Facebook Pages in the European Migration Crisis

I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

The project has been using interviews and observations in migrant camps for part of its work, but another component of it has focussed on migrants’ uses of Facebook. t studied some 179 pages, containing 75,000 posts and 2.1 million comments, over a period from 2011 to 2018. The first challenge in this was to develop a meaningful sample of relevant Facebook pages. This was further complicated by the closure of API access following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

To address this, the project used a mixed-methods strategy that surfaced relevant pages from interviews with migrants, and then reviewed those pages for their continued relevance to the migration crisis. This also required a typology of the Facebook pages in the study: these might be fully formal, semi-formal, or informal; in English, Arabic, national languages, or multilingual; and attracting small, medium, or large audiences.

Of the pages selected – which focussed especially on Greece, Germany, and the Øresund region –, some 95 were in Arabic; 34 in national languages; 26 in English; and 23 multilingual. 142 were informal, 28 semi-formal, and only 7 fully formal (e.g. run by government agencies). Informal pages were generally most active, but sometimes also started later in the period. Major events in the political management of the crisis affected activity levels, but there were highly divergent patterns across different regions and languages. Informal and semi-formal pages and pages in Arabic were mainly created at the height of the crisis, while the creation pages for formal pages and pages in other languages are more spread out over time.

Some of the most widely shared stories were images and videos of migrants arriving in their host country, rather than – as originally expected – information on how to make the migration journey to Europe. Links encountered connected Facebook pages with external resources.

There is a need, then, to pay more attention to the minor, informal actors in this context. These provide information and services that are of significant consequence, yet remain a complex and unstable part of the digital ecosystem around migration. The fact that they were largely created during the migration crisis may point to the fact that official pages and other information sources were insufficient by themselves.