Comparing Trends in Anti-migrant Political Discourse in Canada and Germany

Comparing methods by which misinformation and disinformation online alters public opinion in one country sheds light on threats to democracy in others.To this end this paper aimed to replicate a study that revealed how German far-right narratives travelled through social media platforms, news media and party networks to turn public opinion against a 2017 UN agreement called the Global Compact on Migration. Ulrike Klinger and her co-authors identified a mechanism by which information circulating within a right-wing media ecosystem escaped its confines and impacted the larger national debate on immigration. In this paper, we used Twitter data following the Syrian refugee crisis to examine the immigration debate in Canada in 2019 to assess whether a similar mechanism is visible in the interaction between white supremacist groups and mainstream political groups on immigration.