Social media and public discourse on immigration

This project addressed two debates within migration studies and political science about the relationships between traditional media, social media, and public discourse on immigration.

First, it engaged with the long-standing debate that traditional media disproportionately cover immigration negatively, and with more recent studies suggesting that social media reinforces negative portrayals of immigration policies and immigrant populations. Given the influence of both on public opinion, the project examined these dynamics in depth.

Second, the project examined whether social media environments encourage more partisan and aggressive communication about immigration. Drawing on research showing that social media can weaken social norms and intensify polarization, it asked to what extent these environments shape how people communicate about immigration.

Canada served as a central case, given its large immigrant population and the salience of immigration in media and politics. The United States provided a comparative case, as it shares similar demographic characteristics but is widely understood to be more polarized on immigration. The project compared Canadian and American social media discourse and public opinion to assess whether social media platforms themselves encourage polarization and negative attitudes toward immigrants.

This project will involve the use of quantitative text analysis of social media discourse (primarily Twitter/X posts) from users during 2023. Topic modelling and sentiment analysis will be used to identify the extent to which social media posts amplify negative discussions of immigration among social media users from each country. This observational analysis will help answer the first research question. To answer the second, analysis of social media posts will be coupled with original experiments involving Canadian and American adults.

Politically aggressive social media users are creating most of the anti-immigrant content (external link) . The Conversation, Oct. 5 2025