This study analyzes social media representations of refugees in Turkey and discusses their role in shaping public opinion. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey has created heated debates about their presence and future in the country. One of these debates was triggered by President Erdoğan’s statement that Turkey would issue citizenship rights to Syrians in July 2016. Due to a lack of critical voices about refugee issues in Turkey’s mass media sphere, social media has become a key platform for citizens to voice their opinions. Through a discourse analysis of tweets about the issue of refugees’ citizenship, I will map different perceptions of refugees in Turkey. I argue that despite contesting discourses about Syrians, the debate on social media reinforces nationalism and an ethnocentric understanding of citizenship in Turkey. As the number of refugees and migrants increases rapidly worldwide, they become the new ‘others’ of national imagined communities. Social media becomes a key communication space where the nation is discursively constructed in a bottom-up manner through manifestations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The analysis shows that social media contributes to trivialization and normalization of discrimination and hatred against Syrian refugees through disseminating overt discourses of ‘Othering’. Social media also enables more covert forms of discrimination through ‘rationalized’ arguments that are used to justify discrimination through the basis of false/non-verified information. Thus, Twitter becomes a space for critical, bottom-up, yet nationalistic and discriminatory statements about refugees.

Social media enable their users to be connected with a diverse group of people increasing their chances of coming across divergent viewpoints. Thus, network diversity is a key issue for understanding the potentials of social media for creating a cross-cutting communication space that is one of the premises of a functioning democracy. This article analyzes the strategies social media users adopt to manage their network diversity in the context of increasing polarization. The study is based on 29 semi-structured interviews with diverse social media users from Turkey and qualitative network maps. Furthermore, the study adopts a cross-platform approach comparing Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp in relation to the diversity of their users’ networks. The study shows that social media users adopt different strategies interchangeably in specific contexts. These strategies include visible (unfriending, blocking) and invisible (muting, unfollowing, and ignoring) forms of disconnection, debating, observing divergent opinions, and self-censorship. Political interest of social media users, political climate, issue sensitivity, and “imagined affordances” of social media platforms play a role in users’ choices about which strategy to choose when they are confronted with divergent viewpoints through their diverse online networks. Building on the unfriending literature that points out to rather partisan users, who unfriend, unfollow or block others, this article demonstrates that in peak moments of polarization, also the politically disengaged or moderate users disconnect from diverse others.

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Digital media offer various possibilities for internet-based telecollaboration in schools and open up a space for intercultural learning. Diverse initiatives like such as the European Union-initiative eTwinning network aim to support telecollaboration projects in education. This article argues that we need to develop critical and grounded understanding of telecollaboration projects and how they are being embedded in the context of existing school cultures. The article presents an in-depth case study of a telecollaboration project between a Turkish and a German school. On the basis of observations in schools, interviews with teachers and focus groups with pupils, the article argues that there are two main challenges that limit the experience of intercultural learning in the analysed project. The first point is about the strong teacher-centred project design and the discrepancy between the perspectives of teachers and pupils. The second point is the rather simplistic and superficial understanding of culture, which reasserts national cultures instead of promoting a more open perspective, that influences the project tasks and topics.