Through the Magnifying Glass of Misinformation

• In Event: The Effects of Framing, Media, and Rhetoric on Immigration Attitudes

Abstract

Misinformation about migration has increasingly been circulated in social media and websites purported to be genuine news outlets, especially at times of mass migration as we witnessed in the case of massive human displacement to the European Union caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While earlier research documented the effects of misinformation in shaping citizens’ evaluations of political candidates and attitudes toward various policy issues, studies exploring how misinformation about migration affect natives’ immigration attitudes and policy preferences remained highly scarce. Addressing this gap, the current study investigates the extent to and the mechanisms through which misinformation about immigration and integration policies affect natives’ support for restrictive immigration policies.

While anti-immigrant attitudes and restrictive migration policy preferences have long been explained through a threat framework, recent studies further incorporate the role of social resentment in shaping opposition to immigration (Davis and Wilson 2022; Hochschild 2016). Building on those findings, we theorize migration policy preferences are predicted by levels of threat perceptions and social resentment. We further expect misinformation depicting migration policies more permissive than they are to magnify the impacts of threat perceptions and social resentment on opposition to immigration.

To explore the link between the misinformation about migration and migration policy preferences, we utilize data from the Turkish context. Facing unprecedented levels of mass migration, Turkey has recently adopted major changes in the migration policy domain. It is in this policy influx, the high level of political polarization in the country espoused with an information ecosystem plagued with information disorders resulted in highly circulated dis- and misinformation regarding the rights, expectations, and responsibilities of various migrant groups residing in Turkey. Given the saliency of migration policies and the prevalence of misinformation about the extent of the rights granted to migrants are considered, Turkey constitutes a well-suited context for examining the impact of misinformation about migration policies on feelings of social resentment and threat perceptions that translate into restrictive immigration policy preferences.

By utilizing previously untapped survey data from Populism and Syrian Refugees in Turkish Politics Project conducted in 2017 with the participation of 1954 respondents representative of the population aged over 18, we conduct a multigroup structural equation model (MGSEM) to investigate how misinformation about the permissiveness of labor and citizenship policies governing migrants affect natives’ preferences to restrict immigration into the country. The findings demonstrate that the propensity of social resentment to translate into restrictive immigration preferences through its elevating impact on threat perceptions is remarkably higher for those misinformed natives who perceive the migration policy context as more permissive than it is. As such, our findings suggest that, when misinformed about policy context, those individuals harboring feelings of social resentment are more likely to feel threatened by immigrants compared to their well-informed counterparts.

Author

• Sedef Turper Alışık, Koç University