Understanding anti-immigration sentiment spreading on Twitter

Andrea Nasuto and Francisco Rowe

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 9, 1-21

Abstract: Immigration is one of the most salient topics in public debate. Social media heavily influences opinions on immigration, often sparking polarized debates and offline tensions. Studying 220,870 immigration-related tweets in the UK, we assessed the extent of polarization, key content creators and disseminators, and the speed of content dissemination. We identify a high degree of online polarization between pro and anti-immigration communities. We found that the anti-migration community is small but denser and more active than the pro-immigration community with the top 1% of users responsible for over 23% of anti-immigration tweets and 21% of retweets. We also discovered that anti-immigration content spreads also 1.66 times faster than pro-immigration messages and bots have minimal impact on content dissemination. Our findings suggest that identifying and tracking highly active users could curb anti-immigration sentiment, potentially easing social polarization and shaping broader societal attitudes toward migration.

Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0307917

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307917

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