Analyzing Shift in Narratives Regarding Migrants in Europe via Blogosphere

Social media is widely used by individuals to express their views or opinions with others. Social media users leverage this platform to further their views by framing narratives and participating in online discourse. Nowadays almost all events, issues, and crises are discussed on social media. Blogs are not regulated by any authority and have no limit on the number of characters unlike other social media platforms which provide bloggers with a richer space of content. Blogs also serve as a platform for agenda-setting and content framing abetting development of weaponized narratives. Blogs are a good source of data for sociologists and political scientists to gain situational awareness about various events which can be achieved by tracking different opinions and political views as being shaped. In this research, we analyze blogs to study shift in narratives in blogosphere towards refugees or migrants during the migrant crisis in Europe. We use the Blogtrackers tool to analyze over 9,000 blog posts published from December 2005 to midMarch 2016. We use named-entity extraction to identify different topics and themes, then use targeted sentiment analysis to study the shift in narratives toward migrants in the blogosphere.