The Swedish immigration discourse in traditional media and social media
Abstract
This application is an extension of the ongoing NAISS 2023/5-561 medium compute project and NAISS 2024/23-342 small storage project to obtain a sufficient amount of data storage resources. The aim of this work is to investigate changes in the Swedish immigration discourse in national newspapers and social media, a highly relevant topic in the context of increasing political polarisation of public debate with respect to refugees, immigration, and Islam in Sweden.
In this work, we analyze overlaps and mismatches in the interpretations of immigration in two entirely different but equally important societal segments that actively produce immigration narratives: nationwide traditional media and online social media. We focus on the case of the Swedish immigration discourse over the period of 15 years (2006 - 2020) to gain insights into the parallel evolution of discourses in the national media and on Sweden’s largest online forum. The period of observation captures the rise of the far-right party Sweden Democrats and the European ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015. We complement previous work by introducing another approach to align and compare the immigration discourses produced by very different groups of actors. We model both corpora in a single-topic model with constraints imposed on topic-word associations (Magnusson et al., 2018; Hurtado Bodell et al., 2022; Watanabe and Zhou, 2022). In sum, this paper aims to take on a macroscopic view of immigration discourses in traditional and social media and (1) identify overlaps and mismatches between the interpretations of immigration among journalists and the online public, (2) compare reactions of immigration discourses in both spheres to major events, and (3) identify points of change in both domains and compare the timing and the nature of these changes for both corpora.
In our research, we are currently focusing on designing a methodological approach for a comprehensive comparison between multiple large-scale text corpora generated by different sources. Having designed the methodological procedure, we are currently testing it with an empirical case study. We, therefore, would like to ask for an extension of the project to enable us to complete the empirical experiments.
