Candles next to an image of Aylan Kurdi, during a gathering to condemn the death of migrants on their way to Europe, in Barcelona, September, 2015.Emilio Morenatti/Press Association. All rights reserved.On
September 2, 2015 the image of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless
body on a Turkish shore made global headlines. The event created public outrage
and brought to the forefront the cruel reality that has become known as ‘the
refugee crisis’. The exodus of Syrian
refugees began many months before, but Aylan’s death caused an international
political reaction and citizen protest began to emerge.

The
‘crisis’ exposed the inability of European policy-makers to offer a viable
solution that guarantees the basic human rights of thousands of people,
additionally failing to fulfil Europe’s obligations under the basic precepts
outlined in the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, as first created in 1957 and amended in 1967.

But
citizens mobilised and made their protests visible by using social media
platforms, like Twitter, to spark numerous actions of spontaneous solidarity
with the refugees. We saw the extent to which activists increasingly rely on
the new information and communication technologies which play a decisive role
in the proposals and imaginaries of social movements and civil society.

As José Tascón (2012) has said, ‘social media
and the Internet form part of the communications framework in which the
perceived justice of a crisis is verified and becomes a platform for the debate
and exchange of ideas and opinions on the perceived reality as unjust’.

Constructing an
uncomfortable European reality

The media’s focus on the so-called refugee crisis has unfortunately centered
on framing migration as a human drama or as a political problem for Europe,
without making a more profound analysis of the causes of the exodus or the
responsibility of the international community itself.

In an article published at the end of 2015, Didier Fassin pointed
out how the European authorities
vacillate between the need to control borders and the need to protect refugees,
at least officially. The result is that we again experience a practice that is
common to the way many issues are handled by the European Union, whereby a
discourse of concern aimed at public opinion is maintained but masks the reality
that refugees are excluded and marginalized.

Of course we can observe that there are varying levels of
implication in the response from different EU countries, ranging from a greater
willingness to help refugees in Germany and Sweden to the minimum contributions
offered by other countries such as the United Kingdom, France or Spain.

Nevertheless, we have observed an increased scrutiny of the asylum process and
policies of treatment and consideration of refugees that are more than
questionable from the point of view of human rights and dignity. In a monograph
published by the magazine Pueblos in
2016, there were references to the confiscation of personal belongings in some
areas in Germany or to Finland’s request that asylum seekers work for free. The
color-coded identification of houses that shelter refugees in Middlesborough,
deserves a special mention. Some have christened this action, “British
apartheid”.

Meanwhile, the barriers erected in Poland, Hungary and Greece have
served as walls of containment to deter entry to the Schengen territory, which
would allow the free movement of citizens throughout several European countries.
So Europe has erected another Iron Curtain for the twenty-first century, which
this time leaves thousands of people abandoned to their own fates in the middle
of chaos, war and misery.

The latest gesture in this vein was the signing of an
agreement between Turkey and the EU on March 18, 2016, which according to
Javier Galparoso, made Turkey both “policeman and refugee camp” at the same
time as it allowed for “the violation of the principle of not turning back
refugees as stipulated by the Geneva Convention”.

Online activism and civic
action: digital solidarity

Activists’ use of the new information and communication technologies
plays a more and more decisive role in the proposals and collective
imaginations of social movements and civil society. The model of organizing in
networks, based on the way that the society of information is structured, has
become a model of reference for social movements and networks that resist and
oppose neoliberal globalization.

The increase in access to information and the possibility of
producing one’s own information modifies the way political intervention is done
at the same time that a plurality of cybernetic formats increases the potential
for discourses, previously absent, to emerge. 

Thus the new concept “cyberactivism” arises, understood as the ensemble
of information technologies which make faster communication within movements
possible while at the same time facilitating the dissemination of information
to a wider audience, generating a digital democracy that relies on the new
technologies to reinforce social and political participation.

The technological revolution has resulted in the creation of a
digital citizen that finds in the Internet new, decentralized ways to mobilize,
to the degree that we could call a kind of “post-modern protest”. Citizens
making demands share lifestyles and the ways in which they carry out and
express their mobilizations more than they do the issues they are vindicating.
The objective in many cases is to perhaps call attention to issues, and make
them visible, rather than aspiring to achieve social change.

This signifies a change in a model based on the participation of the
user. The Internet and its derivations in our technologies provides a platform
for citizens to express their solidarity and opinions, making them active
elements who participate in the production of content and information.

These
possibilities of interaction allow the construction of opinion in the digital
environment, which in the context of political communication results in the
creation of various terms, the most common of which are; politics 2.0,
electronic democracy, digital democracy, virtual politics, cyberdemocracy, and
digital solidarity.

In future article, we want to explore how digital
solidarity, as a new form of social participation, has the capacity to
influence the political agenda. For the moment, we concentrate on the digital
response via Twitter expressing solidarity with the refugees.

World Refugee Day

To
analyze influence, we chose the hashtag #DiaMundialdelosRefugiados (World
Refugee Day) which was a trending topic in first position for 11 hours and 15
minutes on 20 June 2016, making
it the longest lasting HT to keep that position that day. The tool we used for
calculating the variables was
Audiense (formerly SocialBro). The analyzed sample contained
1967 tweets.

The first data that captured our
attention was that next to the HT #DiaMundialdelosRefugiados, other related HTs
began to appear such as #pocavergüenza (shameless) and #refugioporderecho (refugee
by law). The use of these HTs makes clear what the community of people
participating in the event wanted to say.

Analysis of keywords contained
in the analyzed tweets ­– refugees, slip through, people, Europe, Turkey, shame
– gave us a clear thermometer of the
sentiment of repudiation towards the several solutions that have been put forth
as political options. With respect to gender, there is no clear predominance of one sex over
another, but rather there is a clear sign of parity. The topic of refugees moves both men and
women equally.

The sentiments that the analyzed
tweets generated in the cases where it was possible to categorize them, were positive.
They expressed support and solidarity with refugees and were negative when they
addressed existing refugee policy. 

Greece was in second place after
Spain in the countries referenced. This was curious, given that this was an
analysis of Spanish HTs. But this might be explained by the expat community of
Spanish volunteers who are in that country, helping the Syrian refugees who are
landing there. As for the profiles of the various
people who participated, we can confirm that curiously enough, the political parties,
professions and media that were registered as the most active in the Twitter
storm #DiaMundialdelosRefugiados were those from the centre left.

As we stated above, this data provides only a small glimpse into
refugee and online solidarity. There is also the question as to whether digital
solidarity is a substitute for real solidarity or if there is room for both,
without discarding the possibility that digital solidarity could be a tool for
sparking real solidarity.

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References

FASSIN, D. (2015): “La economía moral del asilo. Reflexiones críticas sobre la ´crisis de los refugiados´de 2015 en Europa, en Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, Vol. LXX, nº 2, pp. 277-290.

GALPAROSO, J. (2016): “Europa, al borde del precipicio, en Revista Pueblos, nº 69, disponible enhttp://www.revistapueblos.org/?p=20733

HOWARD, P. (2011): The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

SAMPEDRO, V. (2005): 13M: Multitudes Online, Madrid, La Catarata.

TASCÓN, M. Y QUINTANA, Y.   (2012): Ciberactivismo.   Las   nuevas revoluciones de las multitudes conectadas, Madrid, La Catarata.