70.8 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide for reasons such as poverty or war.

The nearly 351,000 migration-related tweets represented here as circles were collected during the months of August, September and October from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Social media is a rich source of information to observe and understand the views of the general population towards migrants and refugees: how much the matter concerns them, how they feel about it and what events are perceived as particularly important.

US and UK tweets

The United States and the United Kingdom are two countries with large foreign populations that have shown strong views regarding migrants and refugees over the years.

The high engagement of people with the topic of migration in the two countries can be seen from the large number of tweets collected: 251,294 for the US and 99,112 for the UK.

Topic engagement

The number of tweets on the matter is around 2.5 times higher in the US than in the UK.

However, considering the number of inhabitants in each country, we see that the people in the United Kingdom are almost 2 times more engaged with the topic than those in the United States.

With the original tweets being replicated thousands of times, the importance of the topic of migration is reflected on social media engagement. But, how do people feel about it?

Sentiment

The tweets collected can be broken down showing the people's sentiment when discussing about migrants and refugees: negative, neutral or positive.

The migration-related tweets in the US tend to be more negative rather than positive (with more than 50% negatives versus only 33% positives), whereas in the UK they are evenly balanced (around 42% for both negative and positive).

#Hashtags

The hashtags have always been a strong representative of movements on Twitter, and looking at the most popular ones gives us an idea about the topics that people feel strong about in the context of migration.

Popular hashtags in both countries include #refugeeswelcome, #news, #syria and #rohingya. In the US we can see that many hashtags are related to the politics of Trump regarding immigrants, such as #maga, #buildthewall, #closethecamps or #humanrights. Meanwhile, in the UK the most common hashtags are related to the brexit issue and its impact on migrants, such as #brexit, #brokenpromises, #eu, #europe or #familiestogether.

Conclusions & Ack.

In the case of the U.S, it was possible to identify topics such as the episode of the continued practice of migrant families separation at the border and the episode when Trump suggested shooting migrants in the legs.

In the UK the topics pointed to the European economic migrants and the refugee crisis.

Visual Analytics Project. Course by Petra Isenberg at CentraleSupelec.
Developed by Eugen Patrascu and René Gómez.