The Drivers behind Anti-Immigration Facebook Groups in Estonia

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

Estonians are particularly strong Internet (and social media) users; this is especially pronounced for younger Estonians. When the European refugee crisis emerged, this manifested in the rapid creation of various pro- and anti-refugee Facebook groups in the country, at a time when Estonia had not even received any refugees yet (at present, it hosts fewer than 50 refugees).

The study focusses especially on the “Estonians against Refugees” group, conducting interviews with two moderators and 10 active members. These were highly diverse in their background (with some even living abroad), but much of their activity was driven by a deep-seated distrust in the mainstream media, combined with a personal interest in news updates about the refugee crisis; they wanted to know what they perceived as the ‘real’ truth about the crisis. In principle, they are news seekers rather than news avoiders, therefore, and drew their information on the issue from a mix of mainstream and alternative sources, in Estonian and other languages. (Their suspicions against the Estonian mainstream media were also fuelled by the largest Estonian newspaper’s closing of its commentary sections.)

Another motivation for their activities was an interest in sharing their own stories, experiences, and views. They felt that their stories needed to be told, and that Estonian mainstream media failed to do so. Their practices could be understood as ‘information laundering’: legitimating xenophobic and Islamophobic attitudes by sharing supportive media content, and thereby ‘protecting’ their own cultural identity on behalf of what they saw as a silent majority of other Estonians. By contrast, ‘tolerast’ (sic) politicians and journalists were seen as opponents of this efforts.