The representations of migrants in articles shared on Reddit and their related comments.

Abstract

Abstract The so-called 2015 migration crisis has given rise to many questions at a political level as well as at the human level. These issues have been extensively covered in the media and provoked many reactions of the European citizens, especially on the social network websites. However, researchers usually agree on the fact that the media “shape citizens’ understanding of what the arrival of these refugees” (Heidenreich, 2019). In order to sketch both the representations conveyed in the media and the reception of those by the audience, this thesis studies Reddit; a media sharing forum where the users publish online articles and comment on it. This study aims, first, at sketching the representations of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (henceforth RASIM) conveyed in the online articles shared on Reddit over a two- months period (from the 10th of November, 2019, to the 10th of January, 2020). Secondly, the contexts of writing of the articles are examined in order to determine whether it is related to the representations found. Finally, the representations of RASIM found in the comments are also analyzed and then compared to the related articles in order to see to what extent the representations are shared. Combining corpus-driven methods with a discourse analysis approach, this thesis examines the discursive strategies used to represent RASIM, following KhosraviNik (2010) framework of analysis. This framework focusses on three levels of analysis: actors description, actions attribution and arguments. The results show that RASIM are either framed as victims or as burdens in the articles as well as in the comments. They are mostly patient of the actions and represented as a homogeneous population. Several metaphors, emphases and mitigations were found, accompanied with arguments referring to their growing number and the need for management. It was found that rather than influencing the representations of RASIM in the comments, the articles are opening the debate on migration. More surprisingly, no relation between the contexts of writing of the articles and the representations of RASIM were found.