Can social media reduce hostility to refugees?
For those attending in-person, the entrance to CESS is located at George Street Mews and you will need to ring the bell when you have arrived.
As the number of forced migrants continues to raise, friction between migrants and locals has become a pressing political issue globally. These discussions increasingly play out on social media, where the digitalization of interactions and engagement-based algorithms are often blamed for spreading misinformation, increasing polarization, and inflaming existing tensions. Yet social media also offers an unparalleled platform for immediate, low-cost, large-scale interventions to reduce intergroup hostility. This experiment aims to test the effects of naturalistic exposure to varied social media content on locals’ attitudes towards refugees in Turkey. As host to the world’s largest refugee population, Turkey has seen anti-refugee attitudes become entrenched across the political spectrum despite intense polarization. The study design takes advantage of this political landscape to test message vs. messenger effects alongside digital intergroup contact, exposing participants to ‘digital contact’ with content from refugee accounts paired with political content from either political ingroup or outgroup ‘messengers’.
Date:
1 May 2024, 14:00 (Wednesday, 2nd week, Trinity 2024)
Venue:
Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, George Street OX1 2AA
Venue Details:
This is a hybrid event--interested participants can attend in person at Cess's conference room or virtually via Zoom.
Speaker:
Emma Walker-Silverman (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Nuffield College
Organiser:
Noah Bacine (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Noah Bacine (University of Oxford)
Part of:
CESS Colloquium Series
Booking required?:
Recommended
Booking url:
https://cess-nuffield.nuff.ox.ac.uk/events/colloquium/emma-walker-silverman-university-of-oxford/
Booking email:
Noah.Bacine@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Cost:
N/A
Audience:
Public
Editors:
Noah Bacine,
Martina Beretta
