Migration Reframed? Multilingual analysis on the stance shift in Europe during the Ukrainian crisis. Sergej Wildemann L3S Research Center Germany Erick Elejalde L3S Research Center Germany Keywords: migration, social media, stance detection, multilingual analysis Abstract The war in Ukraine created a large wave of refugees leaving the country. Four months after the 2022 invasion, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported 5.1 million1 Ukrainian refugees [1]. By September 2022, more than 4M people have registered for protection schemes in European countries, especially in Poland with more than 1.3M and Germany with more than 700k persons2. This makes the situation in sheer numbers comparable with the European refugee crisis of 2015-2018. The conflict in Ukraine and the resulting migration received much attention in mass and social media. At the same time, there seems to be a more positive framing of migration, specifically toward refugees from Ukraine. Before the escalation of the conflict, media coverage and government policies on migration mainly focused on other groups coming from conflict zones, such as Syria, Ethiopia, or Afghanistan. However, they tend to be addressed in the context of economic and security threats [6, 3]. Attitudes towards migration are influenced by information from the press [8, 5] as well as by political agendas in the respective European countries. Media analysis has shown frequent negative terminology such as ’illegal’, ’violence’, ’terrorist’ used in this context [7, 4, 3]. Moreover, news reports have linked certain crimes or socioeconomic issues (e.g., the rise of unemployment) to immigration [14, 2]. In contrast, in 2022, the humanitarian crisis at the EU border resulting from Ukrainians fleeing the war prompted a massive reaction of support by the Western media and a great display of solidarity from the European public in particular. Several differences might have triggered this change, including (a) the intensive reporting about the war situation raises empathy (there was also a more ”welcoming” culture during the war in Syria) and (b) the demographic difference in the migrant population (about 90% of the refugees from Ukraine are female2). Another significant difference seems to be (c) the cultural proximity of Ukraine to the EU compared to refugees from the Middle East [12]. We investigate whether the impression of a stance shift towards migration is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. The abundance of audience interactions on Twitter with the news provides a precious source of data for understanding users’ engagement patterns and evolving opinions on sensitive topics [11, 10]. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies from their audiences, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction in Europe. In particular, we focus on the five western and central European countries France, Germany, 1Until June 16th, there were 7.7 million border crossing from Ukraine since February, but 2.5 million crossed back to Ukraine in the same period [1]. 2https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine 1