Well Informed? EU Governments’ Social Media Campaigns for Potential Migrants

Information plays a vital role in migrants’ decision-making before and during their journey. In particular since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015/16, governments have recognised this need, launching social media campaigns to inform potential migrants about the risks of their journeys and obstacles they might face in destination countries. As common tools for migration management, these campaigns often appear to have a humanitarian character, yet can be considered attempts to dissuade migration in general. The actual impact of such campaigns is questionable and insight into the types of information provided by governments under-explored. This paper investigates the kinds of information provided by EU governments to potential migrants via social media. It further discusses the ethical questions of neutral public communication and transparency, which such campaigns in the EU unavoidably raise. The paper will present preliminary findings based on expert interviews with NGO and government representatives about the decision-making processes behind the campaigns and content analyses of their messages to identify emerging patterns of information for the purposes of migration dissuasion. This research is embedded in the project ‘Informing to dissuade: Governments’ digital information campaigns for migrants as bordering practices’ (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Grant-Nr. 9057-00009B), which investigates the types of information in such campaigns and their dissemination networks on social media across Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, and Italy.