Social Media, Populism, and Migration

Abstract

Several scholars have attributed high hopes to social media regarding their alleged ability to enable a nonhierarchical and freely accessible debate among the citizenship (Loader & Mercea, 2011; Shirky, 2011). Those hopes have culminated in theses such those describing the social web as being a ‘new public sphere’ (Castells, 2009, p. 125) as well as in expectations regarding its revitalizing potential for the ‘Habermas’s public sphere’ (Kruse, Norris, & Flinchum, 2018, p. 62). Yet, these assumptions are not uncontested, particularly in the light of socially mediated populism (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2018). Interestingly, research on populism in the social web is still an exception. The same is true for the populist permeation of the social media discourse on migration, as a highly topical issue. This study seeks to elaborate on this research gap by examining to what extent the Twitter debate on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) was permeated by populist content. For this purpose, almost 70,000 tweets on the most important Hashtags referring to the GCM that took place in Marrakesh in December 2018 were collected and the 500 widest-reaching tweets analysed in terms of their populist permeation. Against initial expectations, the empirical findings show that populist narratives did not dominate the Twitter debate on migration. However, the empirical results indicate that ordinary citizens play an important role in the creation and dissemination of populist content. It seems that the social web widens the public sphere, including those actors who do not communicate in accordance with the Habermasian conceptualization of it.

Economic Distress and Populism: Examining the Role of Identity Threat and Feelings of Social Exclusion

“…Populism has affected democratic debate in liberal democracies (Datts, 2020; Rooduijn, 2014). Although scholars debate the phenomenological nature of populism, consensus has emerged that it pivots on an antielitist view that leads to a conflictual relation with establishments and institutions (Laclau, 2005; Moffitt & Tormey, 2014; Mudde, 2017).…”

The Spectacle of “Patriotic Violence” in Romania: Populist Leader George Simion’s Mediated Performance

“…Populists exploit political mediatization on the backbone of crises that are discursively framed within the confines of political divides (Bobba & Hubé, 2021) and employ a hybrid communication strategy, so beyond news media, other digital platforms are used for disseminating messages and directly connecting with "the people," as "new media is conducive for populist communication" (de Vreese et al, 2018, p. 427). Social media in particular has become a successful set of venues for populist actors, especially on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (Datts, 2020;Engesser et al, 2017;Ernst et al, 2019), and Telegram (Urman & Katz, 2020), seeing how the logic of these platforms is free from the professional norms of news media and their more passive audience (Mudde, 2019).…”

Social media and politics on the local level

“…The recirculation effects have been demonstrated in several studies (Chadwick, 2011; Vaccari & Valeriani, 2015). The importance of ordinary citizens for the distribution of political messages has been demonstrated empirically in terms of populist actors in general by Datts (2020), in terms of the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 by Enli (2017, p. 54) and with regard to the AfD by Serrano et al (2019). In addition, it has been demonstrated that mass media frequently respond to trending topics on social media (Araujo & van der Meer, 2020, p. 634).…”