Legacy Media as a Moral Compass: A Computational Study of the Politicization of a Migrant Crime on Twitter in France

This article explores the role played by legacy media in the pervasive situation where far-right activists highly politicize migrant crimes on social media. Focusing on particular crimes they consider indicative of a state’s failure to secure borders and protect its citizens, they utilize social media platforms to mobilize and garner political and media attention. However, little is known about the dynamics of influence between far-right activism on social media and legacy media in the process of politicizing migrant crimes. To overcome the analytical and methodological limitations of current research, we have developed a computational method to capture the public discussion that took place in France around a single event – the murder of a young teenager in Paris in October 2022. Applying an event identification algorithm to a vast corpus of Twitter data has enabled us to analyze the dynamics of public discussion held in various arenas, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This article’s main argument is that legacy media act as a “moral compass” vis-à-vis far-right mobilizations that politicize migrant crimes on social media. While they were unable to influence the volume of attention that social media users pay to this murder, the French legacy media have contributed to setting limits to the form and spread of politicization by the far right on social media. More specifically, they were able to influence the attention paid to the facts that serve as the basis for discussion on social media and to steer that discussion toward questioning the relevance of politicizing the crime.