Syrian university students' practices of using social media

Social media, social media platforms and digitalization have encompassed almost all aspects of human life in this period. Migrant individuals or communities can reach many audiences through digital platforms and share their hardships through social media or other digital media. In turn, the host society can communicate their feelings and thoughts towards migrant groups through social media. In this context, it becomes important to analyze social media platforms in order to understand the structure and relations of both societies in the migration process. Therefore, the aim of this study is to understand why and how Syrian students use digital tools, what they share in the virtual environment, how they find the host society's attitudes towards them and how they express them in digital environments. In this study, in order to reach detailed findings, qualitative method was preferred and semi-structured interviews and document analysis techniques were used. Harran University, which also has a large number of Syrian students in Şanlıurfa, a city with a large Syrian immigrant population, was selected as the study area. According to the findings of the study, social media is used for communication, information, socialization and propaganda purposes. It was determined that Syrian students use social media tools to communicate with family, relatives and friends. Although students use social media for various purposes, it is understood that they also frequently use it to share information with each other about the places they want to migrate to during the migration process. Especially in the process of adaptation, the negative effects of social media posts were found to be higher than the positive effects. In order to comprehensively examine the impact of social media in the migration process, it is important to make other groups the subject of research.