allow us to interpret this result as also informative about how a change in the tone of the news influences the timing of migrants’ movements toward their final destinations. Migration in Libya is in fact largely unidirectional: most migrants move from South to North-West, i.e. toward the coastal areas where there are more employment opportunities, and from where - those directed to Europe - then attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea.<sup>5</sup> It follows that our result, i.e. a more negative tone in the migration-related news at destination makes more migrants stay longer in Libya, can be read as indicating that a worsening news sentiment slows down the migrants’ journey by delaying the next step of their travel to destination countries.

Our interpretation is corroborated by results showing that the effect of a change in the tone of migration-related news on migrant’s choices is driven by articles related to _discrimination_ . This finding is consistent with the idea that the tone of news articles on discrimination episodes predicts the attitude of the local population in destination countries towards migration and the level of difficulty that migrants may encounter in terms of job opportunities, access to housing, and social integration in these countries (World Bank, 2023; Aksoy et al., 2023). A more negative news sentiment in articles related to these events indicates that conditions at destination are worsening, reducing the incentive for the individual to make the next step of the migration journey towards the final destination.

To validate our findings, we provide suggestive evidence that the effect of changes in the tone of the news is significant only for migrants located in areas where it is more likely that they have access to the Internet and that our results are not driven by reverse causality. We also show that our findings are robust to several checks, including: an alternative way of measuring the tone of the news; the use of different samples; an alternative estimator; increasingly demanding model regression specifications; the inclusion of additional controls for the political orientation of the governments in destination countries, and the tightness of the Mediterranean Sea patrolling activity; and the use of spatial regression models to account for spatial autocorrelation in migrants’ movement choices.

Next, we characterize the conditions under which changes in the tone of the news are more likely to have an effect. Our results show that a worsening news sentiment at destination slows down migration movements in Libya _only_ for migrants coming from West African countries (who are those usually making a step-by-step journey to Europe) or located in the Western region of Libya (where there are more economic opportunities), and when migration-related news articles are more numerous and mostly positive, or economic conditions in destination countries are not favorable. While these results corroborate our main findings by showing that the effect of changes in the tone of the news is significant when, where, and for whom we expect it to be so, they also indicate an overall limited impact on migrants’ movements within Libya and towards destination countries.

Finally, we test for the possibility that changes in the news sentiment generate spillover effects across countries. Results indicate that when the tone of migration-related news becomes more negative in a country, migrants tend to switch to other countries as preferred destinations. Yet, we find that this substitution does not occur between European and non-European

> 5This characteristic of the migration flows in Libya (i.e., they mainly move in the same direction) is similar to that of migration flows from Central America to the U.S., suggesting that our approach can also be used in other contexts if similar data are available.

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