Learning in the wild behaviours: Migrants seeking information through social media

There are many ways that migrants learn socially in an online setting. The landscape of social media is fast evolving and so is the use of social media by newcomers.

This project aims to explore the ways in which newcomers engage with different types of social media platforms performing information retrieval search and connective learning.

1. What are the features/factors that shape migrants' usage of social media platforms for seeking information or building networks?
2. What is the connection between in-person and online seeking of information and networking?
3. What types of information are migrants seeking and learning from online connections and communities?
4. What are the main concerns of newcomers when using social media?

This project will use a mixed-methods approach including semi-structured surveys, online experiments, and interviews. This study will collect and analyse publicly available posts and metadata from social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, YouTube, and Telegram.

The team is currently developing further work focusing on micro influencers in the social media as well as analysing social survey data from the Virtual Bridge project, analysing the ways in which newcomers use social media to search for information in different social media platforms like Reddit vs Facebook or Twitter/X.

Members of the research team have also completed three Major Research Projects, focusing on the methodological aspects of this project, which set the groundwork for future empirical studies:

• Sameer Ladha examined the relationship between political polarization and hate speech towards refugees and immigrants on Reddit.
• Vaidehi Atodaria studied public Facebook posts using sentiment analysis and topic modeling to explore how geopolitical tensions influenced immigration discourse.
• Ricky Yu analyzed over 1.8 million Twitter/X posts with the hashtag #StopAAPIHate to investigate public sentiment around immigration and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Published or in press publications:

Several publications building on previous research in the Virtual Bridge project and a conference held in May 2023 have just been published in Open Access:

Triandafyllidou, A. and Monteiro, S. (2024) Migration narratives on social media: Digital racism and subversive migrant subjectivities, 29(8-5), August 2024, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/754 (external link)  .

Triandafyllidou, A. and Monteiro, S. (2024) Migration narratives on social media: Digital racism and subversive migrant subjectivities, 29(8-5), August 2024, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i8.13715 (external link) 

Expected completion: August 2026

• Virtual Bridge: Delivering Settlement Services Through Social Media (Anna Triandafyllidou, Stein Monteiro and Nevyn Pillai)

• Inside the Social Media Lab’s Bridging Divides Studies on Online Migration Discourses

ADTs; advanced digital technologies; information; social media