Digital borders: a critical discourse analysis of Turkish Twitter/X discourse around immigrants (2023–2025)

Abstract

This research explores prevailing frames on Twitter/X discussions pertaining to immigration and immigrants, with a focus on Syrian migrants in Türkiye from 2023 to 2025, and analyzes the evolution of these frames over time. For this research, both quantitative and qualitative methods (a combination of critical discourse analysis and basic computational tools such as topic modelling and sentiment profiling) were utilized. It employed a structured data collection technique, using a multi-phase eligibility funnel and a stratified purposeful sampling strategy. Analysis was based on a topic modelling of 193,813 unique tweets, generating 61 high-coherence topic clusters (with values ranging from 0.56 to 0.71) and five dominant discourse frames. Findings revealed that Turkish Twitter/X discourse was dominated by invasion, expulsion, economic burden, security, and crime threat narratives, as well as political actors’ instrumentalization of immigration as a scapegoating tool. Other but less frequent frames were calls for voluntary return, cross-cultural comparisons, religious empathy, cohesion, comedy or sarcasm, and other mixed issues. Furthermore, findings revealed that narratives about immigration evolved in tone and emphasis, peaking in hostility during the 2023 elections, declining in negativity in 2024, and developing into a more policy-focused and normalized yet still predominantly negative discourse in 2025. This research has practical implications for several stakeholders of political communication, including journalists and media communicators, educators, policymakers, and social media platforms. It also has humanitarian implications for discussing prejudice and discrimination, and for promoting a more fact-based, empathetic community in which social cohesion issues can be discussed constructively.