East within the East: Representation of Syrian identity on Twitter as a form of self-orientalism

• Published in: Uluslararası Medya ve İletişim Araştırmaları Hakemli Dergisi - MEDIAJ Vol. 2021; no. 1; pp. 117 - 144
• Main Author: Sarıbek,Merve Zeynep
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi 01.01.2021
• Subjects: İletişim; Aydın; Türkiye; other; Self-oryantalizm; content analysis; öteki; içerik analizi; Self-orientalism; Twitter; Suriyeli kimliği; Syrian identity
• ISSN: 2757-6035
• DOI: 10.33464/mediaj.877659

Turkey has faced a major refugee crisis after the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and currently hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees. The growing number of Syrian refugees in Turkey has raised a problem of social integration and representation. Hate speech towards Syrians has proliferated on platforms such as Twitter. At the heart of this digital discourse, there’s an influence of neo-orientalist and self-orientalist refugee representation that dominates the Western media. The West has closed its doors to refugees from the Islamic geography. Refugees are left out as "unidentified others" of the new world. The orientalist perspective internalized in Turkey, especially after the westernization process, adopts this Western discourse. This discourse is reflected most intensely on social media. In the study, the selforientalist discourse of the middle class, educated and young prosumers towards Syrian identity on Twitter were examined through tweets. Through the Knime software, the tweets containing the phrase "Syrian" were analyzed with content analysis method. The study aims to reveal how the self-orientalist discourse towards refugees is represented through digital media. In the tweets, Syrians were first represented as a social and economic threat (47,8%). The largest part of the tweets (36%) contains the “claims about Syrians”. These tweets are full of unsupported and manipulative claims. Overall, the percentage of tweets (16,3%) that reflect Syrians only as humans is low. In other tweets, Syrians have been represented as illegal aliens (15,2%), dehumanized (5%) and backward (2,3%) groups. These results revealed the prevalence of othering language and stereotypes towards Syrian identity on Twitter.