Narratives of the Refugee Crisis: A Comparative Study of Mainstream-Media and Twitter

Adina Nerghes,Ju-Sung Lee

doi:10.17645/mac.v7i2.1983

Abstract

The European refugee crisis received heightened attention at the beginning of September 2015, when images of the drowned child, Aylan Kurdi, surfaced across mainstream and social media. While the flows of displaced persons, especially from the Middle East into Europe, had been ongoing until that date, this event and its coverage sparked a media firestorm. Mainstream-media content plays a major role in shaping discourse about events such as the refugee crisis, while social media’s participatory affordances allow for the narratives to be perpetuated, challenged, and injected with new perspectives. In this study, the perspectives and narratives of the refugee crisis from the mainstream news and Twitter—in the days following Aylan’s death—are compared and contrasted. Themes are extracted through topic modeling (LDA) and reveal how news and Twitter converge and also diverge. We show that in the initial stages of a crisis and following the tragic death of Aylan, public discussion on Twitter was highly positive. Unlike the mainstream-media, Twitter offered an alternative and multifaceted narrative, not bound by geo-politics, raising awareness and calling for solidarity and empathy towards those affected. This study demonstrates how mainstream and social media form a new and complementary media space, where narratives are created and transformed.

Highlights

In 2015, more than 1.3 million refugees arrived at the borders of the European Union (European Parliament, 2017), with many in need of protection from war, violence, and persecution
Among the prominent topics—those having the highest relative weights—are those focused on ongoing developments: the refugee crisis developing in Europe, general discourse on policy and politics in the context of the crisis, the UK’s dealing with the crisis, and events in Hungary, the country through which many refugees endeavored to cross on their way to Western Europe
While some of the themes on Twitter corresponded to those in the news, Twitter users introduced new themes into the discussion, which should not be surprising since social media afford users with near unlimited opportunities to push debates into new directions (Liu, 2010; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

In 2015, more than 1.3 million refugees arrived at the borders of the European Union (European Parliament, 2017), with many in need of protection from war, violence, and persecution. The complexity and duration of this influx of displaced individuals have created a climate of uncertainty over the political, economic, and societal implications. In such times of uncertainty, individuals orient themselves towards various types of media (Perse, 2001) in an attempt to understand who the refugees are and what their arrival means for their respective countries. As perceptions of refugees and migrants have been shown to be rather volatile and susceptible when those consuming information feel threatened (Esses, Medianu, & Lawson, 2013), the type and characteristics of such information are of crucial importance. The ways in which refugees are perceived become even more important when considering

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