How did the migration crisis debate spread online?

Introduction

At the beginning of our research, we were interested in tracking the debate about the european migration crisis in its development online, in order to find the most relevant and heated topics connected to it. We decided that a good way to start was to ask Google: with more than 3 billion searches queried every day, Google is by far the best source when it comes to finding out what people worldwide are really interested in. The Google Trends tool let us compare search queries and position them by time and geography, plus these trends reflect and often anticipate the mainstream media’s interest.

Knowing from previous research that, when referring to the migration crisis, there was often confusion about the proper use of the words migrant and refugee, we decided to type the two queries refugee crisis and migrant crisis in Google Trends and later trace back any potential point of interest trying to find what caused it.

Protocol

How to read it

The chart shows the evolution of the two chosen queries with a focus on the trend’s spike in the first week of September. In the lower section, the articles appeared on news sites about Alan Kurdi are highlighted.

Findings

The first question that comes to mind looking at the above visualization is about the sudden change in searches volume in the first week of September. What we found out is that in the front pages of all the news sites we could retrive with The Wayback Machine from September 2nd through September 4th, the most relevant news related to the migration crisis was the death of Alan Kurdi, a syrian child who drowned right off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey. It’s important to note that a lot of times the article was not strictly about the fact itself, but great relevance was given to the photographs representing it. Another evidence of the importance of this event is that on September 4th two articles were added to Wikipedia: Death of Alan Kurdi and Photographs of Alan Kurdi (later merged toghether).

It’s also interesting to notice that before September 2nd, the two search queries were head to head in terms of volume. After that though, it seems that the photographs of the death of Alan Kurdi shifted the public conversation towards the word refugee.

Data

Timestamp: 20/11/2015 - 23/11/2015

Data source: Google Trend, Wikipedia, Alexa

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