Abstract
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the
critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees
from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how
the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the
representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this
purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a
novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts
published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021,
plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media
coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected
European countries.
The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the
discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to
"refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees".
However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more
diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance
shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent
national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
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