MIGRANTS AND MISINFORMATION:

MIGRANTS AND

MISINFORMATION:

Key themes in Nigeria,

Bangladesh and Malaysia

International Organization for Migration

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Email: [email protected] • Website: www.iom.int

Media Measurement is a leading digital research consultancy that pairs data-driven

technology with insight-led human analysis to help organisations lter through the increasingly

noisy spaces of online and oine media. Media Measurement prides itself on its ability to

uncover digital intelligence in research projects, with award-winning precision and strategic

value, for non-governmental organizations, governments, major corporations and brands. It

has been running media insight programmes for more than 25 years and has deployments in

over 60 countries in more than 50 languages.

Michael Urquhart is a Consultant at Media Measurement, where he applies open-source

research methods to explore digital media data. As head of the Society research practice,

Michael helps governments and civil society organizations understand digital narratives and

develop their strategic communications programmes, working across research areas including

migration, corruption, children’s rights, and armed conict. Michael holds a Master’s degree

from the University of Edinburgh where he previously explored various topics in the eld of

communications, including the digital propaganda strategy of extremist organizations.

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Fax: +41 22 798 6150

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Required citation: Urquhart, M., 2021. Migrants and misinformation: Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia.

International Organization for Migration (IOM). Geneva.

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PUB/2021/022/L

MIGRANTS AND

MISINFORMATION:

Key themes in Nigeria,

Bangladesh and Malaysia

Written by Michael Urquhart, Media Measurement

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

iii

Contents

List of table and gures .......................................................................................................................................iv

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 1

2. Methodology ....................................................................................................................................................... 3

2.1. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation .................................................................................3

2.2. Research process ......................................................................................................................................................3

3. Thematic case sudies ....................................................................................................................................... 5

3.1. Emigration: Travel to developed countries ....................................................................................................5

3.1.1. Emigration and the Nigerian rumour mill ..............................................................................................5

3.1.2. Misinformation, ampliers and critical engagement ...........................................................................5

3.2. Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia ...............................................................................................................8

3.2.1. The social media persecution of Rohingya ............................................................................................8

3.2.2. Common claims: Preferential treatment, legitimacy and attitude ................................................9

4. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................................15

Appendix A ............................................................................................................................................................. 17

References ...............................................................................................................................................................19

List of table and gures

Table 1. Summary of data collection per country ..........................................................................................3

Figure 1. Nigerian Twitter users discussing 2020 United States' travel restrictions

(January–September 2020) .....................................................................................................................6

Figure 2. Immigration and emigration discussion in Bangladesh:

Twitter versus online news (January–September 2020) ............................................................8

Figure 3. Sentiment overview: Public Facebook posts versus user comments in

Bangladesh and Malaysia (January–September 2020) ..................................................................9

Figure 4. Sentiment breakdown: User comments in Bangladesh and Malaysia

(January–September 2020) .................................................................................................................. 10

Figure 5. Claims in Bangladesh user comments, by category ...................................................................11

Figure 6. Claims in Malaysia user comments, by category ........................................................................11

Contents

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

1. Introduction

While rhetoric and propaganda have long been core features of public discourse, the prevalence

and velocity of false information, or misinformation, has accelerated in the 21st century. With the

emergence of digital media as our main forum for the exchange of ideas, and the resulting collision

of free expression with a business model built on capturing and maintaining user attention,

it has

become increasingly dicult to untangle truth from untruth. The problem is compounded by the

fact that “bad information” spreads more quickly than “good information”,

and existing research has

developed a theory of how false narratives begin “to take on the heightened status of a plausible

reality within a community as pseudoknowledge”.

This epistemic crisis, which is a symptom and a cause of fractures in civil society, has the potential

to heighten pre-existing prejudices against migrant communities. The meeting of misinformation and

migration has generated much attention in highly developed Western democracies, with notable

recent examples including former United States' President Donald Trump’s provocative and harmful

remarks about migrants from Latin America

and coverage of the 2015–2016 large-scale migration to

and through Europe from Turkey.

Recognizing that the current canon of literature on misinformation may be biased toward Western

contexts, in this report we collected data from three under-researched countries: Nigeria, Bangladesh,

and Malaysia. While it is important to note that social media conversation is transnational, by prioritizing

geographies outside of Northern America, Europe and Australia we hope to contribute to a fuller

understanding of how misinformation informs the discussion around migrants, particularly on social

media where false narratives travel quickly.

In this paper, we consider the key concepts relevant to misinformation and describe our methodological

approach, which includes social network analysis to identify proles amplifying misinformation and

human coding to detect changes in the content and character of false claims. After considering some

limitations, we then examine two themes in turn: emigration to developed countries and host attitudes

to Rohingya refugees. In these sections, we analyse examples from social media conversations in

Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia, to understand the prominence of misinformation in the conversation

around migration and the role that it plays in accelerating harmful narratives. We also consider some

of the strategic responses that have had varying degrees of success. We end by tying our conclusions

together in a short discussion section to reect on the theoretical link between misinformation and

the social discourse around migration, and the need for (a) critical digital behaviour, (b) eective

resources to detect and counter misinformation, and (c) supporting interventions from social media

companies.

Orlowski, 2020.

Vosoughi et al., 2018

Introne et al., 2018.

Fleuriet and Castellano, 2020.

European Commission, 2019.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

2. Methodology

2.1. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation

Misinformation, or the negligent or accidental spread of falsehood, is distinct from disinformation, that

is, purposeful deception. It is also distinct from malinformation, which describes the malign framing of

facts for nefarious purposes.

These phenomena have a particular salience on social media platforms,

which operate on a highly decentralized mode of communication by “enabl[ing] a direct path from

producers to consumers of content”.

This context can have a signicant impact on the ease with

which users form opinions and shape them into false or misleading narratives.

The ethical implications of characterizing user-generated content as misinformation, disinformation

or malinformation are signicant, especially since we do not have the resources to fact check every

claim discussed in our analysis. However, by looking at the way in which individual comments coalesce

into trends on social media we can understand how the confusion of information feeds a broader

discourse that gives colour to false or misleading narratives, or “pseudoknowledge”,

about migrants.

For simplicity, in this paper we use misinformation as an umbrella term to capture the various nuances

that stem from the broader category of false or misleading claims.

2.2. Research process

Focusing on the time period between 1 January 2020 and 30 September 2020, our analysis explored

two thematic case studies through posts and reactions on the most popular social media platforms

in the concerned countries.

− Our rst case study focused on Nigeria, with the objective to understand how misinformation

plays a role in the discussion of emigration, specically as it relates to news media reporting

around the opportunity for Nigerians to travel overseas in light of restrictions introduced by

destination countries.

− Our second case study explored users’ reactions to public social media content relevant to

Rohingya refugees in Malaysia and Bangladesh.

Our data collection is summarized set out in table 1 below.

Table 1. Summary of data collection per country

Nigeria Malaysia Bangladesh

Twitter posts 25 733 - -

Twitter users 15 936 - -

Facebook posts - 30 30

Facebook comments - 600 600

UNESCO, 2018.

Del Vicario et al., 2016.

Introne et al., 2018.

2. Methodology

Regarding Nigeria, our analysis focused on discussions of Nigerian Twitter users concerning the

January 2020 travel restrictions taken by the Trump Administration to limit the extent of travel to and

from various countries under the pretext of national security.

We collected the data using custom

search lexicons in English in Meltwater Explore,

a social media data aggregator that allows users

to isolate relevant social media content by applying keyword searches written using Boolean logic.

After exporting 25,733 Tweets discussing the travel restrictions, we processed the resulting mention

network of 15,936 user proles in the mapping tool Gephi,

before identifying a list of top network

hubs, or ampliers in the conversation. A qualitative reading of these user proles allowed us to

uncover key posts featuring misinformation, which occurred in the context of a heated debate about

what constitutes ethical and unethical journalism in Nigeria. Throughout, we also used CrowdTangle,

a social monitoring tool that records the popularity or prominence of online news content on social

media.

For Bangladesh and Malaysia, we curated a sample of the top 30 most engaging public Facebook posts,

or seed posts. For this step, we used Fanpage Karma,

a social media monitoring tool that allows

users to extract public Facebook posts based on a limited keyword search. All of the seed posts were

exported based on the following criteria: (a) originated in the target countries, (b) mentioned Rohingya,

and (c) emerged in the reporting period between January and September 2020, which was broken

down into smaller analysis units to allow for comparison over time. The seed posts were generally

published by politicians, journalists and news media outlets, and were selected for their high rate of

engagement through likes, shares, and comments which suggested a greater degree of interaction

among other Facebook users. For each of seed posts, we analysed the top 20 user comments, which

were ranked "Most Relevant" according to the Facebook algorithm. The categories applied in this

process were identied by inductive coding

and included: Attitude, Criminality, Culture and Lifestyle,

Health, Legitimacy and Preferential Treatment (see appendix A). Applying this message specication,

we monitored the extent to which the various types of false claims about Rohingya were increasing

or decreasing in volume. Since we were interested in understanding the balance between hostile

and humanitarian reactions in public user comments, we also applied a sentiment analysis through a

human interpretation which tagged comments as either positive, neutral, or negative depending on

their perspective towards Rohingya refugees. In combination, these steps allowed us to capture the

changing tone of public attitudes towards Rohingya as expressed on Facebook, a key social media

platform in both Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Although human coding is inherently subjective, coding by

knowledgeable local analysts was necessary to capture nuance, such as sarcasm and humour, and also

to record sentiment with greater accuracy than most available computer-driven sentiment analyses

allow. While we would have preferred to include a larger sample in our analysis, time and budget

constraints dictated samples of 600 user comments each for Bangladesh and Malaysia. Future analyses

might benet from a larger dataset, however we have endeavoured for our conclusions not to make

generalizations beyond the scope of our research.

BBC, 2020.

Meltwater, 2020.

Bastian et al., 2009.

See www.crowdtangle.com.

See www.fanpagekarma.com.

Given, 2008.

StatCounter, n.d.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

3. Thematic case sudies

3.1. Emigration: Travel to developed countries

3.1.1. Emigration and the Nigerian rumour mill

Misinformation in traditional media, or “fake news”, has long been recognized as a problem in the

Nigerian information environment. In 2009, journalist Sola Odunfa observed that “the Nigerian

rumour mill [...] is so powerful that it has permeated the conventional media. Many newspapers and

magazines publish products of the rumour mill as authentic news”.

There have since been concerted

eorts to tackle the problem: CrossCheck Nigeria, a project driven by the non-prot organization

First Draft News, was launched in 2018 “to help the public make sense of what and who to trust

online”.

Furthermore, the BBC hosted the Beyond Fake News summit in Abuja in January 2019.

Despite these initiatives, misinformation continues to characterize the information environment in the

country, accelerated by the decentralization eect of social media.

In this broader information context, emigration emerged as a common discussion topic in Nigerian

social media conversations. This was particularly prominent in light of various restrictions placed on

the ability of Nigerians to travel overseas in 2020, which generated widespread claims of sensational

reporting in news outlets. The January 2020 travel restrictions declared under the pretext of national

security by the Trump administration in the United States of America constitute a representative

example of a key driver of conversations on Nigerian social media during the concerned period.

Some articles, outlets and public gures were called out by social media users as spreading “fake

news” because of their misleading headlines or hyperbolic commentary on the new restrictions. This

demonstrates how social media can provide the public with an opportunity to contest media hype and

underlines the symbiotic relationship between these two forms of media.

In the following section

we explore misinformation and user reactions to travel restrictions aecting Nigerian emigration,

analysing notable user proles that amplify misinformation in the conversation network.

3.1.2. Misinformation, ampliers and critical engagement

We built a list of 15,936 user proles discussing the 2020 United States' travel restrictions on Twitter

between 1 January and 30 September 2020 and mapped the corresponding conversation network

using the visualisation tool Gephi. Our intention was to use this controversial media event as a lens

through which to examine ampliers – proles that are most active in disseminating information

throughout the network and seeding conversation among new social media users – to detect any

emerging misinformation narratives relevant to the scope of this paper.

Odunfa, 2009.

First Draft, 2018.

BBC, 2019.

Hassan and Hitchen, 2020.

Roese, 2018.

3. Thematic case sudies

The resulting network graph is displayed in gure 1, with top ampliers measured by in-degree, or

the total number of re-tweets/QTs/mentions received by each unique prole, assigned a colour ID.

Several of the top network hubs, including @AfricaFactsZone (pink), @BashirAhmaad (yellow) and

@womenvoiceNG_ (red), posted neutral reporting or commentary.

Figure 1. Nigerian Twitter users discussing 2020 United States' travel restrictions (January–September 2020)

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Former United States' President Donald Trump (green) also featured prominently in the conversation

network, perhaps unsurprisingly given that it was his administration that implemented the new

restrictions. Others exemplify more critical reactions to the news: @ogundamisi (orange) shared an

NBC article questioning why the United States should continue to sell arms to Nigeria, highlighting

the Trump administration’s alleged hypocrisy in claiming that unchecked violence in the country was

a key factor in applying the new restrictions.

Most relevant for this analysis were @cliqik, @renoomokri and @tedhesson. Although they were not

among the top inuential ampliers in the network, the discourse around their content contributed to

various misinformation narratives emerging in relation to the news of United States' travel restrictions.

− Highlighted in cyan, @cliqik noted that a previous “ban” on travel between Nigeria and the

United States occurred in 1984. Generating almost 4,000 engagements, this content was widely

recycled by other Nigerian social media users who used the claim to mount a partisan attack

against President Buhari, who was said to have been the Head of State during both restrictions.

The 1984 ban was later debunked by Agence France Presse as a false claim.

Tijani and Olakoyenikan, 2020.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

− In brown, @renoomokri published a Tweet defending United States' travel restrictions as

reasonable because Nigeria had “release[d] thousands of ‘repentant’ Boko Haram members, any

of whom could get a US visa and wreak havoc.” While there have been reports of Boko Haram

militants being pardoned throughout the year,

the framing of @renoomokri’s post exaggerates

any potential risk, contributing to a misleading picture of reality.

− Reuters journalist Ted Hesson (burgundy), who specializes in news involving refugees, highlighted

that the new restrictions were only relevant for visas for permanent residency. This clarication

contradicts the media spin that was widely applied to characterize the restrictions as an outright

ban on travel.

Many Nigerians cited Mr Hesson’s clarication, demanding that prominent

ampliers, media outlets and politicians “stop spreading lies” about the extent of the restrictions.

This observation ts other examples of social media controversy around real or perceived travel

restrictions. An article titled “Germany Announces New Migration Restrictions for Nigerians”

has

generated over 7,000 Facebook engagements to date according to the browser plug-in CrowdTangle.

Published in Punch, which self-describes as the most widely circulated newspaper in Nigeria, the article

was heavily criticized on social media for its misleading portrayal of facts. While the title suggests strict

new legislation obstructing the ability of Nigerians to migrate to Germany, the actual body of the

article is considerably more conciliatory. In a meeting between the Minister of State of the German

Federal Chancellery and the Nigerian Federal Commissioner for Refugees, Migrants and Internally

Displaced Persons, the former noted that, while the criteria set out in the Skills Migration Act must be

adhered to, there was a desire to assist Nigerian emigrants who wished to travel to Germany legally

and an oer of support with guidance, training and language courses. A comments thread on a post

by the ocial Punch Twitter account sharing the articles showed the spectrum of the social media

reaction among Nigerians. While some appeared to accept the premise of the headline, others were

extremely vocal about an alleged lack of journalistic integrity, with representative comments including

“Read to understand before you comment” and “Bad journalism! Misleading headline!”.

While Nigerian social media delivered notable examples of misinformation and false narrative, the

reaction to claims around travel restrictions represented a complex picture of user interaction with

media claims. These ndings resonate with other research which has found that Nigerians are highly

likely to report that they have been exposed to misinformation.

This critical engagement oers

a valuable counterpoint to assumptions about credulous digital activity among social media users

in developing countries.

In “A Call to Think Broadly about Information Literacy”, Marsh and Yang

argue that accurate evaluation of source credibility is dicult because the traditional markers of

responsible sources have been “hijacked”.

Nonetheless, in our examples from Nigerian social media,

it appears that an organic reaction to misleading headlines, articles and social media posts were at

least partly successful in dispelling false narratives and mitigating their spread. As we shall explore in

the following sections, there remain signicant concerns about how and when social media users share

false narratives uncritically, with implications for the role of social media companies and the need for

an attitude of healthy scepticism in online behaviour.

Abu-Bashal, 2020.

Tijani and Olakoyenikan, 2020.

Punch, 2020.

See www.crowdtangle.com.

Wasserman and Madrid-Morales, 2019.

BBC, 2018.

Marsh and Yang, 2017.

3. Thematic case sudies

3.2. Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia

3.2.1. The social media persecution of Rohingya

In our narrative analysis exploring the digital conversation in Bangladesh and Malaysia, we detected

some discussion around emigration. The experience of Bangladeshi expatriates working overseas

and their reduced capacity to send remittances to support family members at home, for instance,

highlighted some claims of misinformation that may warrant further research. Despite these isolated

examples, we made the decision to focus on Rohingya refugees for two main reasons.

First, their displacement generated a disproportionate reaction on social media (e.g. in Bangladesh;

see gure 2) and was therefore interesting to us given our theoretical concern with the way in which

misinformation travels on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. We also reected that exploring

issues related to entry and stay in destination countries, that is, immigration understood in a broad

sense as to cover as well displacement, would oer an interesting counterpoint to our focus on

emigration in the context of Nigeria, and thereby help to build a balanced view in our thematic

analyses.

Figure 2. Immigration and emigration discussion in Bangladesh: Twitter versus online news

(January–September 2020)

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Second, and most signicantly, throughout 2020 there was strong criticism of the role of social

media companies, especially Facebook,

in accelerating the spread of harmful misinformation about

Rohingya, with genocidal consequences in Myanmar according to the United Nations Human Rights

Council.

Given Bangladesh and Malaysia’s proximity to the Rohingya crisis and role as destination

countries, we were eager to understand how attitudes towards Rohingya as expressed on social media

in these countries might have been inuenced and accelerated by false narratives. This was further

encouraged by the analyses of local researchers who have agged the digital environments in both

Malaysia and Bangladesh as worrying hosts of misinformation. Echoing Sola Odunfa’s critique of the

“Nigerian rumour mill”, Bangladeshi researchers have highlighted the role of “social media rumours”

Mozur, 2018.

United Nations, 2019.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

in accelerating negative perspectives on a range of relevant humanitarian topics.

With regards to

Malaysia, the existing literature has tied the issue directly to the experience of Rohingya refugees. Both

news reporting and academic research have identied harmful attitudes towards Rohingya that travel

widely on social media, propelled by misinformation.

Certainly, Bangladesh and Malaysia are no dierent than any country in the internet age; all geographies

must confront the problem of misinformation as it manifests online.

However, we placed a high value

on the research opportunity presented by two comparatively under-researched contexts to build an

understanding of misinformation as it relates to Rohingya. In this section, we explore the dierent

claims being made about Rohingya in public Facebook posts and related user comments and reect

on viable responses to misinformation online, before consolidating our ndings in a short theoretical

discussion to conclude.

3.2.2. Common claims: Preferential treatment, legitimacy and attitude

Before addressing the harmful eects of misinformation on social media in Malaysia and Bangladesh,

it is important to stress that the content captured in our samples was not universally hostile towards

Rohingya, and in fact many of the opinions were supportive, often out of humanitarian concern. Of

the 60 public Facebook posts we designated “seed posts”, the majority in both Bangladesh (80%)

and Malaysia (77%) were either positive or neutral in their sentiment towards Rohingya (see gure

3). However, reecting a common assumption that comments threads tend to breed incivility,

user

comments on our sampled seed posts were signicantly more likely to take a negative character:

58 per cent in Bangladesh and 70 per cent in Malaysia. While further research into humanitarian

reactions on social media would be interesting, the top priority in this section was to explore the role

of misinformation as a catalyst for harmful views, and our analysis reects that impetus.

Figure 3. Sentiment overview: Public Facebook posts versus user comments in Bangladesh and Malaysia

(January–September 2020)

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Al-Zaman, 2020.

Augustin, 2020; Lati and Ananthalakshmi, 2020; and Zainul, 2020.

Guanah, 2018.

Yi-Fan Su et al., 2018.

3. Thematic case sudies

The sentiment breakdown across three time periods (T1 = 1 January 2020 to 31 March 2020; T2 = 1

April 2020 to 30 June 2020; T3 = 1 July 2020 to 31 September 2020) of user comments in Bangladesh

and Malaysia shows clear trends in each country (see gure 4). In Bangladesh, the proportion of

negative user comments increased period on period, from 45 per cent in T1, to 59 per cent in T2, and

70 per cent in T3. Malaysia, on the other hand, recorded a signicant surge in T2, when 92 per cent

of sampled user comments were negative. It was also notable that there were fewer positive or

supportive comments overall in Malaysia – just 1.5 per cent compared to 13 per cent in Bangladesh.

Figure 4. Sentiment breakdown: User comments in Bangladesh and Malaysia (January–September 2020)

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Looking beyond sentiment, it was interesting to nd that a signicant proportion of critical comments

in both countries also included an empirical claim about the Rohingya community – 43 per cent for

Malaysia and 93.4 per cent for Bangladesh. In order to explore these claims and the manner in which

they layered up into broader narratives, we coded the user comments in the sample according to a

message specication of claims split by category, which were selected by an inductive process based

on our qualitative reading of the samples (see gures 5 and 6).

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

Figure 5. Claims in Bangladesh user comments, by category

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Figure 6. Claims in Malaysia user comments, by category

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

Our analysis uncovered false claims in a variety of dierent categories, ranging from allegations that

Rohingya were more likely to transmit COVID-19 and HIV, to reports of higher criminality among the

community, and harmful commentary about Rohingya’s supposedly poor work ethic. By far the most

striking trend across both Bangladesh and Malaysia was a signicant increase in the number of claims

being made about preferential treatment of Rohingya by non-governmental organizations (NGOs),

the host Government, and the wider international community. Between T1 and T2, the number

of claims regarding preferential treatment rose by 472 per cent in Bangladesh and 533 per cent in

Malaysia, with both registering yet further increases into T3. The Bangladesh sample included 39 posts

(7% of the sample) in which users expressed frustration that Bangladesh, itself a low-income country,

had the responsibility of providing aid and shelter for refugees.

3. Thematic case sudies

Grievances around the allocation of aid were combined with false claims that Rohingya were

seeking to establish their own sovereign state within Bangladesh. This specic assertion featured in

6 per cent of the sample and points to a broader social media narrative around legitimacy and

sovereignty; it also represents the interdependence of traditional and social media in the penetration

of false narratives into the information environment. A news article with an embedded video

purporting to show refugees praying for a Rohingya community leader to become the Prime Minister

of Bangladesh has generated almost 62,000 engagements across public Facebook posts.

In addition

to generating user engagement, the reach of this claim is signicant, having been shared by a variety

of groups including “We Work to Protect Bangladesh”, which boasts more than 2.1 million followers.

In Malaysia, criticism was often directed at the international community and development agencies.

The most common claim in our analysis on Malaysia, featured in 3 per cent of the sample, was that

the Rohingya community was being overindulged by NGOs. For example, various users expressed

the opinion that forged documentation allowed Rohingya refugees to work in the country: “most

of them use fake UNHCR cards.” There were also numerous allegations that other members of the

Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were not suciently pulling their weight in the

accommodating Rohingya refugees, leaving Malaysia overburdened. However, as in Bangladesh, the

harmful eect of these types of complaints was accelerated where they occurred in tandem with clear

examples of misinformation circulated about the Rohingya community itself. Across the reporting

period 65 items (11%) in our sample of social media posts from Malaysia included a claim about the

attitude or behaviour of Rohingya refugees, who were regularly depicted as rude, disrespectful or lazy.

In a widely repeated example, it was asserted that Rohingya were falsifying their religious identity in

order to gain sympathy and exploit the religiosity of Malaysians, which encourages assistance of fellow

Muslims.

The reasons behind observable trends around preferential treatment, legitimacy and attitude, and

the specic examples that animate them, are a matter of conjecture. As researchers our focus has

been on user content as it is presented online, rather than any attempt at a diagnosis of intent. This

information is not available to us without oine methods, such as interviews or surveys. Neither is it

possible to draw causal links between news reports or public posts and the user comments that they

attract. In the communication of ideology, Thompson criticizes approaches that invoke the myth of

the passive recipient;

the reading of any text (or article, or social media post) is an active, subjective

process which is peculiar to the reader. However, given our ndings and the context in which they

occur, we do feel comfortable speculating on the motivations behind some of the more egregious

examples of misinformation.

One such example, which we found to be common in the social media conversation in Bangladesh,

was a false analogy drawn between Rohingya and Bangladesh, and Palestinians and Israel. While we

stress that this analogy is mistaken and harmful, the fact that this particular type of misinformation

was so often replicated, and the manner in which it was invoked, revealed something signicant about

the impulse to lend credence to false narratives about Rohingya in the countries we sampled. In some

examples, social media users warned that Rohingya would seek their own land within Bangladesh “the

way Palestinians are in Israel”. Numerous others claimed: “we will become like Palestinians in our own

country”, “it’s not too late to be like Palestine”, “maybe we have to accept like Palestine, who are

helpless in their motherland today”. Some social media users in Bangladesh and Malaysia are concerned

that their rights and well-being are being contested that support for refugees and care for local

populations are contested in a zero-sum equation. The allocation of resources is a commonly debated

topic and, as we showed in our sentiment analysis, hostile views are in the minority; many more social

media users are likely to reect on the Rohingya crisis in humanitarian or neutral terms. However,

Jago News 24, 2020.

Thompson, 1978.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

the clear learning from our research is that negative social media reactions are being accelerated and

exacerbated by outright misinformation that contradicts any humanitarian reex online and therefore

warrants a strategic response.

During our initial research, we found a Malaysian fact-checking website that represents eorts to

stie the spread of false narratives on a case-by-case basis. In one example, a video purporting to

show violence between Rohingya and locals was found to have been lmed in Indonesia,

while a

separate video of a Rohingya youth begging for money was actually resurfacing footage that had

originally gone viral in 2017.

Fact-checking has been recognized as an important tool to inuence

people’s assessment of the truth or falsehood of information, for example in the process of electoral

campaigns,

although researchers disagree over the format that it should take and are increasingly

questioning whether it can ever be 100 per cent eective in the rst place.

Previous studies have

identied a “continued-inuence eect”, arguing that the power of misinformation persists beyond so-

called debunking,

and a well-cited paper argues that fact-checking can actually accelerate adherence

to false narratives.

The fact that a video is outdated or mislabelled may have little impact once the

content is out “in the wild”, and indeed drawing attention to such content – even to debunk it – may

do more harm than good.

This “backre eect” has been hotly contested, giving new impetus to explore how fact-checking

can contribute to a strategic response to misinformation online.

One clear tactic is to appeal to

respected sources of information to oer a viable alternative to false narratives: on the topic of

Rohingya, for example, the World Migration Report produced by the International Organization of

Migration has been cited as clear evidence to debunk false claims about the number of illegal migrants

living in India.

Further to this, innovative approaches are being trialled by social media companies

in moves that recognize the strength of users’ critical engagement with digital information, as we

described in the case of Nigeria. Twitter has recently launched Birdwatch,

which allows users to ag

misinformation and add notes to suspect content in a kind of crowd-sourced moderation. Relying on

users to self-police may be viewed as cynically shifting responsibility, although a more charitable and

optimistic interpretation suggests that tech companies are taking their culpability in the spread of

harmful narratives more seriously.

Sebenarnya Malaysia, 2020a.

Ibid., 2020b.

Fridkin et al., 2015.

Ecker et al., 2020.

Lewandowsky et al., 2012.

Nyhan and Reier, 2010.

Haglin, 2017; and Wood and Porter, 2017.

Chowdhury, 2019.

Coleman, 2021.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

4. Conclusion

The results of our human analysis of content from Malaysia and Bangladesh act as a reminder that social

media is often a fairly uncivil environment, where users feel empowered by a degree of anonymity to

express opinions that are alienating and harmful. Our ndings highlight how user-generated content has

a topspin of misinformation that often accelerates anti-immigrant rhetoric. Allegations that Rohingya

benet from disproportionate aid to the detriment of host communities are ltered through specic

claims about unwelcome attitudes and behaviours in the community. Combined with false reports

about the appropriation of rights and sovereignty, the result is a narrative that represents a social media

persecution of Rohingya occurring in tandem with their oine persecution. Our ndings resonate

with existing studies that describe a misinformation eect resulting in real harm towards Rohingya in

these countries. However, we also found that a majority of users express neutral or positive attitudes,

despite prominent examples of news reporting that highlights criminality over humanity.

To the extent that false claims remain unchecked by platform moderation, our ndings t with other

observations about the culpability of social media platforms in the spread of harmful views, although

recent eorts to confront this problem and innovate new solutions are encouraging. Another

component in this equation is sensational and hyperbolic reporting, which has become a mainstay of

the modern news media, especially when it resurfaces on social media, where attention and clickbait

underwrite successful business models. These patterns rearm the need for critical digital engagement,

which we recognized among social media users in Nigeria, who appear to scrutinize news headlines

and reporting. This organic approach seems well-equipped to counter and neutralize misinformation

narratives before they get o the ground. Comparisons between Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia can

only go so far, and our research shows that Nigeria has its own challenges with false claims. However,

the critical thinking often shown with regards to Nigerian emigration is worth cultivating in interaction

with digital content more broadly, especially where it can be combined with the strategic use of

respected resources in fact-checking eorts.

False claims, which may have some grounding in reality and are therefore dicult to counter, feed

broader narratives that have the potential to inuence perceptions and self-perceptions of immigrants

and emigrants as expressed on social media. Until government and tech company policy catches up

with the scope and scale of the problem, critical engagement with online information at the individual

level seems likely to remain the rst and best line of defence against misinformation.

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

Appendix A

Message specication applied to user comments on public Facebook posts related to Rohingya in

Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Category Message

Attitude

Critical of hosts

Ungrateful

Too demanding

Work ethic

Rude

Other/General

Culture/Lifestyle

Religion

Dirty/Unhygienic

Begging

Drug taking/Stimulant use

Other/General

Criminality

Theft/Burglary

Forged documents

Drug dealing

Kidnapping

Terrorism/Extremism

Violence

Other/General

Legitimacy

Seeking or establishing political power

Seeking or establishing own state or "takeover"

Seeking rights/citizenship/passports

Other/General

Health

COVID-19

HIV

Other/General

Preferential Treatment

NGOs

Government

International community

Other/General

Migrants and misinformation:

Key themes in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Malaysia

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MIGRANTS AND

MISINFORMATION:

Key themes in Nigeria,

Bangladesh and Malaysia

International Organization for Migration

17 route des Morillons, P.O. Box 17, 1211 Geneva 19, Switzerland

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Email: [email protected] • Website: www.iom.int

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Michael Urquhart is a Consultant at Media Measurement, where he applies open-source

research methods to explore digital media data. As head of the Society research practice,

Michael helps governments and civil society organizations understand digital narratives and

develop their strategic communications programmes, working across research areas including

migration, corruption, children’s rights, and armed conict. Michael holds a Master’s degree

from the University of Edinburgh where he previously explored various topics in the eld of

communications, including the digital propaganda strategy of extremist organizations.