war narrative (Crilley (2017)). The presence of perspectives from all sides of the conflict leads Gohdes (2020) to note that “the Syrian conflict is one of the first conflicts where lines between offline and on-line conflict engagement have become blurred” (Gohdes (2020)). Outside of the Syrian context, social media data is increasingly used alongside, or even in place of, public opinion surveys, often with highly similar results (Schober et al. (2016)).

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, the role of which have been more widely studied (Khamis et al. (2012), Metzger and Siegel (2019)), we extend analysis to include data from Telegram “an encrypted platform that is harder for governments to monitor” (Mitts (2019)). Much of the research on Telegram has focused on its use by ISIS (Prucha (2016), McDowell-Smith et al. (2017), Yayla and Speckhard (2017)), though Telegram’s privacy policies also support civilians and protest movements worldwide (Urman et al. (2020)). Though much work has been dedicated to the role of social media in constructing violence narratives, it also plays a vital role in migration movement (Frouws et al. (2016), Miconi (2020), Sánchez-Querubín and Rogers (2018)). Refugees share information about routes and conditions in potential host countries to ease the journey for future displaced peoples (Frouws et al. (2016)). In interviews conducted with 44 young refugee or immigrant Syrian social media users, Miconi (2020) finds that these platforms are used for not only staying connected to war developments but also facilitating resettlement in the host country. A similar Facebook specific study notes that members of the diaspora turn to the platform to maintain social ties (Ramadan (2017)). Given the ubiquity of social media in the conflict, it follows that Syrians use social media not just for the war effort or to learn of migration routes but also to assess local conditions for return.

In acknowledgement of the convenience and importance of social media, a recent line of inquiry involves combining social media data with traditional variables to predict displacement (Singh et al. (2019), Abrishamkar et al. (2018)). Singh et al. (2019) rely on Twitter data from Iraq to assess when violent events are taking place using sentiment analysis of tweets with the hashtag “ISIS”. In combining this with traditional movement variables, they improved the accuracy of displacement predictions. To show the flexibility of such techniques, they are adapting a Spanish language model for use on the Venezuelan crisis (Singh et al. (2020)). Similarly, Abrishamkar et al. (2018) adapted a variety of techniques to get a signal of violence from news articles, and used this signal as a factor in predicting displacement (Abrishamkar et al. (2018)). By assessing topic variations in return and non-return areas and areas with and without IDPs, and noting differences in discussion of violence, governance, and services, we show that social media reveals information about return decisions and builds a foundation for adapting such techniques to consider signals which favor return, as well as bringing in new aspects such as image analysis.

# **4 Research Design and Data Collection**

Our analysis relies on novel data collected from Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook in the latest stage of the war beginning after the recapture of Ar-Raqqa from ISIS on 17 October 2017 and going through 1 December 2020. Group selection processes focus on entities which are located in Syria or primarily discussing issues related to Syria. The success of work on predicting displacement using social media conversation (Abrishamkar et al. (2018)) as well as conclusions that social media can be an effective tool for measuring public opinion (Schober et al. (2016)) indicate that users discuss salient events and opinions on social media and thus we anticipate differences in discussion in areas with and without return or IDPs. Analysis is limited to messages posted in Arabic, as messages in the native language are more predictive of displacement (Singh et al. (2020)). We augment our collection of social media data with more traditional indicators gathered from surveys and interviews by the REACH resource center (REACH (2020)), the UN Office for the Coordination 8