Representation and Misrepresentation of Migration in Social Media Discourse in Europe

The paper is based on a wide-scale analysis of social media debate in ten countries – Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Türkiye – that we run in the context of the Horizon 2020 project EUMEPLAT. We studied the debate between 2021 and 2022, selecting the posts discussing a number of keywords related to immigration; and, within this cluster, we focused in particular on those also implying a gender dimension. Following a “digital methods” approach, we collected the most impactful posts in terms of traffic, based on the metrics specific to each platform – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – for a total of 720 posts per country. The focus we adopted is due this topic traditionally being the most polarizing issue in Europe; and, even more, to migration playing the role of constitutive other in the building of the European identity (i.e., Delanty).

We will present an overview on the between-country analysis, and in-depth observations of three sub-trends. In the first case, the use of a set of keywords in national languages allowed us to detect some nuances in the representation of migration. As to the in-depth inquiry, a first significant aspect has to do with all differences, in terms of impact, between the contents posted by common users and those posted by institutions, either media agencies or politicians. The second one is the role played by the reference to Europe in the representation of migration, which will confirm the hiatus between top-down and bottom-up communication (or between top-down Europeanization and Europeanization from below, to quote della Porta). The third aspect, that we also analyzed in force of a qualitative method – the theoretical discourse analysis – is the intersectionality between gender and migration in the social media debate in Europe, which will reveal an intricated pattern.