Displacement and return in the internet Era: Social media for monitoring migration decisions in Northern Syria

Erin Walk, Kiran Garimella and Fotini Christia

World Development, 2023, vol. 168, issue C

Abstract: According to UNHCR reporting there are over 27 million refugees globally, many of whom are hosted in neighboring countries which struggle with bureaucracy and service provision to support them. With the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, gathering data on the location and conditions of these refugees has become increasingly difficult. Using Syria as a case study, where since 2011 80% of the population has been displaced in the civil war, this paper shows how the widespread use of social media could be used to monitor migration of refugees. Using social media text and image data from three popular platforms (Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook), and leveraging survey data as a source of ground truth on the presence of IDPs and returnees, it uses topic modeling and image analysis to find that areas without return have a higher prevalence of violence-related discourse and images while areas with return feature content related to services and the economy. Building on these findings, the paper uses mixed effects models to show that these results hold pre- and post-return as well as when migration is quantified as monthly population flows. Monitoring refugee return in war prone areas is a complex task and social media may provide researchers, aid groups, and policymakers with tools for assessing return in areas where survey or other data is unavailable or difficult to obtain.

Keywords: Social media; Displacement; Refugee return; Syria; Migration; Civil War (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X23000864
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:168:y:2023:i:c:s0305750x23000864

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106268

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().