Tweeting hatred or not: The discovery of online discourse towards Syrian refugees in the context of Turkey-Greece

While the operations within the scope of Operation Euphrates Shield, began by Turkiye, were continuing, the official authorities announced that 34 Turkish soldiers had been killed in the incidents which took place on 28 February 2020. This was followed by the occurrence of various social incidents, one after the other. During this period, Turkiye announced that the controls on its border gates with Europe had been stopped, resulting in the migrants making their way towards the border with Greece. The migrants, who were left between the border lines between the two countries as a result of the Greek government increasing its border security and refusal to permit passage, came face to face with a situation of chaos and uncertainty which lasted for days. Certain statements were generated and circulated in the Twitter platform as a reflection of these social incidents, which had occurred in the offline environment. This study has been put together surrounding the questions as to how the online statements directed at migrants were generated on Twitter by users in Greece and Turkiye, how they were circulated and the way they were spread. In line with this, the purpose of the study is an exploration of the online statements directed at the migrants, which were generated on Twitter, within the context of Turkiye and Greece. A qualitative design has been adopted in the study, with a desire to reveal the context of the social realities, the meaning attributed by users to the process and the dynamics in the construction of the discourse. The "hashtag etnographics" strategy was used in the study to establish the relationship between the offline sources of digital practicalities and their context, and key concepts and hashtags were used to reach the statements and perceptions of the users. The study data has been drawn from the Academic Research API application provided by Twitter, with the aid of the Python programme, stored and sorted in a manner which would make it suitable for analysis. Specific concepts were searched on Twitter in two languages, using the purposeful sampling method, within the framework of the determined criteria, in line with this, and a total of 147,265 tweets (94,186 in Turkish and 53,079 in Greek) were taken from the platform. The 500 tweets with the highest interaction in both languages were examined using the content analysis method. The data was coded and analysed under certain themes using the MAXQDA 2020 programme. In addition to this, the data was visualised using the Tableau programme before being presented to the reader. It was determined within the scope of the study that the number of negative tweets and tweets containing statements of hate among both the Turkish and Greek tweets were dominant. In the online discourse, the migrants are referred to as a threat to public order and social peace, principally responsible for economic problems, an indispensable trump card in politics and a source of fear generating hate.