The political debate on X/Twitter about Venezuelan migration in Colombia: A framing analysis

Abstract

The objective of this article is to examine the digital narratives on Venezuelan immigration among Colombian users. To this end, the article examines the political debate about this group on the X/Twitter platform in Colombia. The sample is constituted by tweets that were categorized in accordance with a typology of generic and specific frames that were specifically designed for the purposes of this content analysis. From a corpus of 160,095 tweets containing the relevant hashtags, 15,703 original tweets were selected for analysis. The findings indicate that there is a continued polarization regarding the framing employed. The generic frames respond to thematic axes, whereas the specific frames predominantly portray migrants as victims of a conflict or humanitarian crisis (25% and 17.3%, respectively). Those who situate them within the context of fiscal threat or public order account for 26.7% of the total. The data obtained suggest that it is essential to promote an informed and constructive public debate on Venezuelan migration in Colombia. This implies not only addressing misinformation and hate speech, but also providing spaces for the voices of migrants and host communities to be heard and taken into account in public debate and policy decisionmaking.