CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024

Friday, September 29th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 27, rue Saint-Guillaume, room François Goguel

Immigration News Remix: Unraveling Online Distortions of Mainstream Narratives

Katharina Tittel (PhD Student, Sciences Po - CRIS & Medialab)

Media studies have long scrutinized the portrayal of migration, primarily within traditional newspapers, and assuming a top-down influence of elite-produced news frames on audiences. However, social media has disrupted these dynamics, challenging conventional media effects theories and raising questions about the roles of political actors, citizens, and civil society organizations in content distribution and framing effects. Which contents actually circulate, by whom, and how are they shared?

This research diverges from past content-centric studies, focusing on the circulation of news content online. It relies on digital-trace data from Facebook shares of immigration-related articles from mainstream newspapers in Germany and France from 2015 to 2019, as well as the sources shared in French immigration-related tweets from 2020 to 2021, using natural language processing, manual source classification, and combining the Twitter dataset with Chapel Hill expert survey data to estimate users' ideological leanings.

The analysis reveals that far-right political activists, along with anti-immigrant civil society groups, not only extensively share content from far-right outlets but also remix and recontextualize mainstream news, selectively emphasizing elements that further their agendas. In contrast, centrist and leftist voices, as well as refugee solidarity groups, exhibit markedly reduced engagement.

In the current political climate marked by the ascent of far-right movements in Germany and France, this research exposes how ostensibly "neutral" immigration news can become instruments to advance far-right political agendas. The observed silence among centrist and leftist groups further invites contemplation regarding how such behaviors may inadvertently leave the online space to extremist voices.

Just as organizations and scholars increasingly discuss the challenges of "fake news" and the necessity of fact-checking, this study underscores the urgency of addressing not only the spread of factually false information but also the subtler transformations of factually true mainstream news narratives.

Mandatory Registration. Thank You !