Geographies of resilience, exclusion and opportunity

Much of our research concerns resilience, difference exclusion and opportunity from a variety of perspectives including health and wellbeing, education, crime, ethnicity and the economy.

Anti-immigration sentiment

Immigration is one of the most salient topics in public debate. Social media heavily influences opinions on immigration, often sparking polarised debates and offline tensions.

Studying 220,870 immigration-related tweets in the UK, we assessed the extent of polarisation, key content creators and disseminators, and the speed of content dissemination.

We identify a high degree of online polarisation between pro and anti-immigration communities. We found that the anti-migration community is small but denser and more active than the pro-immigration community, with the top 1% of users responsible for over 23% of anti-immigration tweets and 21% of retweets. We also discovered that anti-immigration content spreads 1.66 times faster than pro-immigration messages, while bots have minimal impact on content dissemination.

Our findings suggest that identifying highly active users could help curb anti-immigration sentiment and ease social polarisation. Importantly, the speed of dissemination is critical, as rapidly spreading hostile content can quickly fuel offline tensions and trigger outbreaks of violence.

Publication

Nasuto A, Rowe F (2024) Understanding anti-immigration sentiment spreading on Twitter. PLoS ONE 19(9): e0307917. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307917"