Over the past decade, there have been growing concerns about the polarization of society, especially along various hot-button topics, such as climate change and immigration.  A recent study from Linnaeus University explores whether this is actually the case when it comes to immigration.

The researchers analyzed over a million tweets from Swedish speakers to gauge whether attitudes have changed on immigration over the last few years.  The findings are especially pertinent as the study period included the years on either side of the refugee crisis in the country in 2015.

Polarized debate

The researchers argue that much of the research into polarization has focused on political support rather than broader social issues, such as immigration.  To try and plug that gap, they analyzed discussions on immigration among Swedish Twitter users between 2012 and 2019.

They used network analysis and natural-language processing to assess around 1.2 million tweets to understand the dynamics of interactions between users in this network and also to quantify the level of polarization in the debate around immigration.

The results showed that there were a few different communities emerging during the study period, but despite the topic generally being viewed as a controversial one, there was no significant evidence of polarization between those communities.  What’s more, the levels of polarization didn’t appear to change significantly after the refugee crisis in 2015.

This event did seem to trigger a shift in sentiment, however, with a generally more negative tone emerging in discussions about immigration.

The authors believe that their findings are sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation, for instance into whether the change introduced by Twitter in 2017 to expand the number of characters permitted in a tweet made any difference in the discussions had.

Ultimately, however, they hope that their findings will help society to better understand the role social media plays in supporting, or reducing, things such as right-wing populism.

“We detected no permanent changes in the levels of polarization that could be directly attributed to the crisis, which applies both to the network and community levels,” the researchers conclude. “Still, we saw a moderate but long-lasting shift towards a more negative tonality of users’ messages after the crisis and a declining share of neutral tweets.”