La frontera de Europa en África: reacciones sociales online ante la crisis migratoria de Ceuta en cinco idiomas europeos

Álvaro Mariscal-de-Gante

doi:10.14422/mig.2024.001

Authors

Álvaro Mariscal-de-Gante Institute of Advanced Social Studies https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8917-2746

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14422/mig.2024.001

Keywords:

migratory crisis, Twitter, migration attitudes, far right, border

Abstract

Albeit migration crises bear crucial societal, political, and diplomatic implications for Spain, this study marks the first computational analysis of real-time online reactions to a Spanish migration crisis since the rise of the far right. Analyzing 195.000 tweets on the Ceuta 2021 crisis, we found that VOX played a major role in shaping the discussion. However, migrant-bashing was not the only, or even the predominant, reaction: social opinions targeted various political, diplomatic, humanitarian, and policy actors. Additionally, this study is the first to assess the discussion in other four European languages, crucial for an EU external border. Results confirm limited interest, with the international and the Spanish-speaking community primarily perceiving the crisis as a (diplomatic) bilateral conflict. The EU was salient only among the former while the latter also perceived the crisis as a pro- or anti- government issue. Conversely, users asserting Moroccan sovereignty and/or a boycott of Spanish products were salient, particularly in English and French.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Abrams, P. (1982). Historical sociology. Open books.

Ahmad, S. R., Bakar, A. A., & Yaakub, M. R. (2019). A review of feature selection techniques in sentiment analysis. Intelligent data analysis, 23(1), 159-189. https://doi.org/10.3233/IDA-173763

Bartlett, J., & Norrie, R. (2015). Immigration on Twitter: understanding public attitudes online. Demos.

Bennett, S. (2018). New “crises,” old habits: Online interdiscursivity and intertextuality in UK migration policy discourses. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1-2), 140-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2016.1257753

Benson, R. (2013). Shaping immigration news: A French-American comparison. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139034326

Bestaver, S., Shah, S., Rivero, G., & Smith, A. (2022, August 16). Politics on Twitter: One-third of tweets from U.S. adults are political. Pew Research Centre. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/16/politics-on-twitter-one-third-of-tweets-from-u-s-adults-are-political/

Bian, J., Zhao, Y., Salloum, R. G., Guo, Y., Wang, M., Prosperi, M., & Sun, Y. (2017). Using social media data to understand the impact of promotional information on laypeople’s discussions: a case study of lynch syndrome. Journal of medical Internet research, 19(12), 414. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.9266

Blank, G. (2017). The digital divide among Twitter users and its implications for social research. Social Science Computer Review, 35(6), 679-697. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439316671698

Bonaccorsi, A., Melluso, N., & Massucci, F. A. (2022). Exploring the antecedents of interdisciplinarity at the European Research Council: a topic modeling approach. Scientometrics, 127(12), 6961-6991. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04368-9

Bozdag, C., & Smets, K. (2017). Understanding the images of Alan Kurdi with “small data”: A qualitative, comparative analysis of tweets about refugees in Turkey and Flanders (Belgium). International Journal of Communication, 11, 24.

Calderón, C., Blanco-Herrero, D., Frías-Vázquez, M., & Seoane-Pérez, F. (2021). Refugees welcome? Online hate speech and sentiments in twitter in Spain during the reception of the boat Aquarius. Sustainability, 13(5), 2728. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052728

Castillo-de-Mesa, J., Méndez-Domínguez, P., Carbonero Muñoz, D., & Gómez Jacinto, L. (2021). Homofilia, polarización afectiva y desinformación en Twitter: caso de estudio sobre la crisis migratoria #Openarms. Redes: Revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales, 32(2), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/redes.913

Ceobanu, A. M., & Escandell, X. (2010). Comparative analyses of public attitudes toward immigrants and immigration using multinational survey data: A review of theories and research. Annual review of sociology, 36, 309-328. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102651

Combei, C. R., & Giannetti, D. (2020). The immigration issue on Twitter political communication. Italy 2018-2019. Comunicazione politica, 21(2), 231-263. https://doi.org/10.3270/97905

Creighton, M. J., Jamal, A., & Malancu, N. C. (2015). Has opposition to immigration increased in the United States after the economic crisis? An experimental approach. International Migration Review, 49(3), 727-756. https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12091

El País. (2023, February 1). Marruecos y España sellan la paz con 800 millones de euros en créditos para empresas. El País - Cinco días. https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2023/02/01/economia/1675278255_275882.html

Europa Press. (2021, May 21). España da por buena la reacción de la UE ante el incidente en Ceuta y no espera más medidas. Europa Press Internacional. https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-espana-da-buena-reaccion-ue-incidente-ceuta-no-espera-mas-medidas-20210521211614.html

Fernández, Á. F., Guijarro, A. R., & Antón, L. A. (2020). Analysis of the discursive characterization of migratory stories on Twitter: The Aquarius case. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 77, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2020-1446

Ferra, I., & Nguyen, D. (2017). #Migrantcrisis: “tagging” the European migration crisis on Twitter. Journal of Communication Management, 21(4), 411-426. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-02-2017-0026

Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. M. (2011). Ideological segregation online and offline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 1799-1839. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjr044

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.

González Enríquez, C., & Rinken, S. (2021). Spanish public opinion on immigration and the effect of VOX [ARI 46/2021]. Elcano Royal Institute. https://media.realinstitutoelcano.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ari46-2021-gonzalezenriquez-rinken-spanish-public-opinion-on-immigration-and-the-effect-of-vox.pdf

Greimas, J. G. (1987). On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. University of Minnesota Press.

Gualda, E., & Rebollo, C. (2016). The refugee crisis on Twitter: A diversity of discourses at a European crossroads. Journal of Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, 4(3), 199-212.

Hadgu, A. T., Naini, K. D., & Niederée, C. (2016). Welcome or not-welcome: Reactions to refugee situation on social media. Germany: L3S Research Center, Leibniz Universität Hannover. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02358v1.pdf

Hainmueller, J., & Hopkins, D. J. (2014). Public attitudes toward immigration. Annual review of political science, 17, 225-249. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-102512-194818

Hoz, J. de la, Fernández-Gómez, M. J., & Mendes, S. (2021). LDAShiny: An R package for exploratory review of scientific literature based on a Bayesian probabilistic model and machine learning tools. Mathematics, 9(14), 1671. https://doi.org/10.3390/math9141671

Janus, A. L. (2010). The influence of social desirability pressures on expressed immigration attitudes. Social Science Quarterly, 91(4), 928-946. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2010.00742.x

Keller, T. R., Hase, V., Thaker, J., Mahl, D., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). News media coverage of climate change in India 1997-2016: Using automated content analysis to assess themes and topics. Environmental Communication, 14(2), 219-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1643383

Kreis, R. (2017). #refugeesnotwelcome: Anti-refugee discourse on Twitter. Discourse & Communication, 11(5), 498-514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481317714121

Krzyżanowski, M. (2018). Social media in/and the politics of the European Union: Politico-organizational communication, institutional cultures and self-inflicted elitism. Journal of Language and Politics, 17(2), 281-304. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18001.krz

Martín, M. (2022, August 15). Marruecos recibirá 500 millones de la UE para que controle sus fronteras. El País. https://elpais.com/espana/2022-08-15/marruecos-recibira-500-millones-de-la-ue-para-que-controle-sus-fronteras.html

Neuman, W. R., Guggenheim, L., Mo Jang, S. A., & Bae, S. Y. (2014). The dynamics of public attention: Agenda-setting theory meets big data. Journal of communication, 64(2), 193-214. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12088

Niu, Q., Liu, J., Kato, M., Shinohara, Y., Matsumura, N., Aoyama, T., & Nagai-Tanima, M. (2022). Public opinion and sentiment before and at the beginning of COVID-19 vaccinations in Japan: Twitter analysis. JMIR infodemiology, 2(1), e32335. https://doi.org/10.2196/32335

Ohme, J. (2021). Algorithmic social media use and its relationship to attitude reinforcement and issue-specific political participation. The case of the 2015 European immigration movements. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 18(1), 36-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2020.1805085

Olmos-Alcaraz, A. (2022). Populism and racism on social networks: An analysis of the Vox discourse on Twitter during the Ceuta “migrant crisis”. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 14(2), 207-223. https://doi.org/10.1386/cjcs_00069_1

Olmos-Alcaraz, A. (2023a). El discurso político sobre las migraciones en Twitter durante la “crisis migratoria” de Ceuta (2021). Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, 31, 13-30. https://doi.org/10.6035/clr.6793

Olmos-Alcaraz, A. (2023b). Respuestas ciudadanas a la extrema derecha en Twitter durante la “crisis fronteriza” de Ceuta (2021). Estudios Fronterizos, 24. https://doi.org/10.21670/ref.2321132

Öztürk, N., & Ayvaz, S. (2018). Sentiment analysis on Twitter: A text mining approach to the Syrian refugee crisis. Telematics and Informatics, 35(1), 136-147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.10.006

Plique, G., Breteau, P., Farjas, J., Théro, H., & Descamps, J. (2021). Minet, a Webmining CLI Tool; Library for Python (version 0.53.2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4564399

Rinken, S., Pasadas-del-Amo, S., Rueda, M., & Cobo, B. (2021). No magic bullet: estimating anti-immigrant sentiment and social desirability bias with the item-count technique. Quality & Quantity, 55(6), 2139-2159. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01098-7

Román-San-Miguel, A., Olivares García, F. J., & Jiménez-Zafra, S. M. (2022). El discurso de odio en Twitter durante la crisis migratoria de Ceuta en mayo de 2021. Icono14, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v20i2.1858

Roncallo Dow, S., Córdoba-Hernández, A. M., & Durán Camero, M. (2019). Aylan Kurdi, Twitter and the short-lived outrage. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 165, 121-142. https://doi.org/10.5477/cis/reis.165.121

Siapera, E., Boudourides, M., Lenis, S., & Suiter, J. (2018). Refugees and network publics on Twitter: Networked framing, affect, and capture. Social Media+ Society, 4(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118764437

Tandoc Jr., E. C., & Johnson, E. (2016). Most students get breaking news first from Twitter. Newspaper research journal, 37(2), 153-166. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739532916648961

Vallo, Z., Jaworek, R., & Matlach, V. (2020). Islamophobic Discourse of Czech Politicians and Political Parties on Twitter during the 2015 Migration Crisis. Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 14(2), 152-176. https://doi.org/10.2478/jnmlp-2020-0009

Varo, L. J. (2021, May 28). La fiscalía de Ceuta investiga las devoluciones en caliente de menores durante la crisis fronteriza. El País. https://elpais.com/espana/2021-05-28/la-fiscalia-de-ceuta-investiga-las-devoluciones-en-caliente-de-menores-durante-la-crisis-fronteriza.html

Vries, E. de, Schoonvelde, M., & Schumacher, G. (2018). No Longer Lost in Translation: Evidence That Google Translate Works for Comparative Bag-of-Words Text Applications. Political Analysis, 26(4), 417-430. https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2018.26

Zagheni, E., & Weber, I. (2015). Demographic research with non-representative internet data. International Journal of Manpower, 36(1), 13-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-12-2014-0261

Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use language to create affiliation on the web. Continuum. https://books.google.es/books?id=gQBHAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=Zappavigna%2C%202012%20Twitter&lr&hl=es&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Zappavigna,%202012%20Twitter&f=false