The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to "refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees". However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
翻译:乌克兰战争似乎积极改变了欧洲对移民这一关键社会议题的态度——至少对来自乌克兰的难民而言。我们通过考察该议题在网络新闻和社交媒体中的反映,验证这一印象是否成立,从而将议题在网络上的呈现与其在社会中的认知联系起来。为此,我们整合并优化了前沿自动文本处理方法,提出了一种新颖的多语言立场检测方法。基于2021年9月起一年内565家欧洲新闻机构发布的550万条推特帖子及其回复,我们对欧洲及部分欧洲国家中与移民相关的媒体报道及社交媒体互动进行了多语言分析。分析结果显示,讨论确实发生了重新框架化,表现为术语的转变,例如从"移民"转向"难民",甚至常强化使用"真正难民"等短语。然而,关于公众感知的立场转变,实际情况比预期更为多样化。所有分析案例均显示,在乌克兰战争爆发前后出现了显著的时间性立场转变,但这一转变的幅度和稳定性存在明显的国家差异。