Discursive construction of migrant otherness on Facebook: A distributional semantics approach

Abstract

The goal of this work is to study the social construction of migrant categories and immigration discourse on Swedish Facebook in the last decade. I combine the insights from computational linguistics and distributional semantics approach with those from classical sociological theories in order to explore a corpus of more than 1M Facebook posts. This allows to compare the intended meanings of various linguistic labels denoting voluntary versus forced character of migration, as well as to distinguish the most salient themes that constitute the Facebook discourse. The study concludes that, although Facebook seems to have the highest potential in the promotion of tolerance and support for migrants, its audience is nevertheless active in the discursive discrimination of those identified as "refugees" or "immigrants". The results of the study are then related to the technological design of new media and the overall social and political climate surrounding the Swedish immigration agenda.