Social media and influencing opinion: An analysis of posts about refugees and migrants on Instagram in the context of manipulation and disinformation

Social media is a very effective communication tool in terms of allowing users to instantly and actively share their feelings, thoughts, actions with other users. Social media, which aims to convey information, thoughts and new communication techniques to internet users and especially mobile users, is full of content for the user to understand, interpret and express ideas about the agenda. These contents can often affect our perspective on another person or an event, and sometimes they can affect the process of recognizing a society. In this case, social media tools, just like other mass media, can cause problems arising from both the source itself and the problems originating from the user to intertwine, making the problems multidimensional. On the basis of information, instant data and notifications come to the fore, and it is seen that this gives messages open to infollution, disinformation and manipulation. The aim of this study is to analyze the posts about refugees and immigrants on Instagram in the context of disinformation and manipulation. Through the hashtags "#norefugees" and "#mülteciistemiyorum" on Instagram, it has been researched what kind of approach towards to immigrants and refugees. By using qualitative data analysis, Instagram posts with these keywords (hashtags) were subjected to certain filtering techniques, and a total of 40 (forty) posts, 20 national and 20 international, were subjected to photographic analysis. As a result of the analysis of the data obtained, the prevalence of misinformation unrelated to immigrants was observed in 70 percent of Instagram posts. In 30 percent of the posts, it has been found that there is both information skewness and perception management regarding immigrants/refugees. As a result of the findings, it has been revealed that social media has effects on users' agenda setting, obtaining and transferring information, re-interpreting the post/news, circulating the posts about refugees and immigrants, and mainly on decision-making processes.