Emerging visions for migrant resistance and resilience: A case for social media

Nandini Jiva

Situating community-oriented infrastructures in migration

Across the many instances of human migration, diverse technology-mediated approaches have emerged to address challenges at different stages of the journey, from pre-departure to integration—each of which is shaped by the perspectives of different actors. For states and multilateral actors, the design intent behind technologies is to manage and predict migration patterns and trends, representing a ‘top-down’ approach to migration management. For communities and other humanitarian actors, the design intent shifts to a migrant-centric approach rooted in serving community needs and centring migrant voices in building and deploying technologies for migration. We have unpacked this divergence in our case study on community-oriented technologies, which we term ResTech.

When public arenas fail to represent the subjectivities of their participants, alternative publics, or counterpublics, emerge, allowing for a co-existence of oppositional interpretations of identities, interests, and needs. Nancy Fraser examined this in her essay, critiquing the public sphere through the lens of gender. She made a case for institutionalised and singular narrative-building in her essay, which is equally relevant to migration, where plurality depends on including vulnerable voices. The erasure of subjective realities in public discourse on migration renders migrant needs and interests invisible, ultimately leading to the formation of counterpublics. This creates barriers to language and social security, among other things.

To this end, our taxonomy on ResTech plays a pivotal role in realising the existence of this counternarrative. This live repository is a collection of efforts that are community-led, and built to fill gaps in information, welfare, and development, and spotlight efforts that make up this counterpublic in migration. ResTech act as resistance systems by rebalancing existing power structures and enabling negotiating power for people on the move. The result of this rebalancing towards the fulfilment of migrant needs is what we consider to be a counterpublic, because it invites a plurality of thought and actors when illustrating the migrant experience. While our taxonomy houses a variety of ResTech that demonstrate these characteristics of community-oriented technologies, we believe that this repository is only the first step in carving out an understanding of this digital layer. Beyond these initiatives, access to community interactions through social media channels assumes centre stage in influencing narratives around migration, acting in many ways as ResTech in principle. 

For Indian students migrating to Germany, for instance, there are community-oriented channels on Reddit and YouTube that act as alternatives to institutional migration infrastructures to address the opacity of the latter. In our case study on Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, we observed how refugees used WhatsApp and WeChat to communicate and obtain information on safe routes while they migrated. Myriad examples around the use of Facebook, Signal, Instagram, and other social media make use of the public sphere to voice unmet and invisibilised migrant needs. This is what ResTech imparts through its continuous endeavours to overhaul a narrative that ever so slightly tilts the consolidation of power in favour of those most removed from migratory realities. 

In all these cases, the recurring presence of a community-centric layer emerges as a response to unmet needs, specifically for the person on the move. In recent times, we have seen the role of digital media and communication channels become instrumental to the flow of information in a manner that can serve a range of actors and a wide variety of needs in the migration ecosystem.

Manifestations of social media as resistance

This counternarrative that is brought about by social media manifests differently across migratory contexts. The emergence of movements around the mobilisation of social media reconcile the existing gaps in how states and multilaterals build for migration, and how ResTech builds for the migrant.

For instance, in 2016, the Calais refugee settlement, nicknamed “the Jungle”, undertook a public-facing campaign on social media to draw attention to the forcible removal of makeshift accommodations in the camp. Through the use of digital tools and mobile technology, protesters were able to create a resistance campaign with photography and iconography that continues to be available online as a resource. 

Community-built and community-oriented infrastructures mediated through social media are built around ethics of support, crucial in mitigating the information asymmetry present in infrastructures built by state and multilateral agencies to manage migration. Due to the relatively open access to fora such as Facebook or WhatsApp groups, migrants often rely on these channels to seek information about safe routes, difficulties faced during the journey, and security and safety considerations. This information is often unavailable through institutional migration infrastructures, due to the legally tenuous nature of the information itself, making it difficult to be displayed on an interface that is set up by institutions such as IOM, or UNHCR.

Social media has also been mobilised as digital resistance to speak out about crises in manifold ways. Palestinian journalists and digital creators documenting the day-to-day trials and tribulations of surviving in an active warzone have further reaffirmed  the ubiquity of social media in migration journeys. Through the use of Instagram and Facebook, both journalists and refugees alike have led efforts to democratise media coverage of the Gaza genocide, resisting legacy media and communication channels to fill in information gaps through the modes accessible to all. The surge in content creation around documenting the day-to-day lives of refugees from Rafah and other parts of Gaza through “a day in the life” videos is a testament to the need for and representation of plurality in public spheres affected by migration. 

Social media, in many ways, functions as an unintentional yet powerful form of ResTech. By providing an open forum for migrants to share experiences, coordinate resources, and voice their realities, these platforms serve as community-oriented infrastructures that counterbalance the top-down control of migration narratives by states and multilateral institutions. This dynamic exists precisely because social media offers a decentralised, community-driven mode of engagement. In this way, the facilitation of social media aligns with the core principles of ResTech: often community-led, responsive to immediate needs, and serves as a tool for resistance against dominant power structures.

Examining the role of social media as ResTech

Many reasons can be attributed to the use of social media to initiate and grow these community-centric movements mediated through technology. One of the reasons for this is the universal usage of social media in the spread of information and communication on the on-ground realities of migratory journeys. For migrants, word of mouth can be a crucial driver in using a platform, especially given the widespread use of social media channels. Validation of social media channels by others’ opinions and experiences around the efficacy of the platform can be critical to the users’ experiences of safety and trust in these platforms. 

This is coupled with the familiarity that comes with using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and other applications. In Aapti’s work on unpacking digital trust, decision-making through the lens of familiarity is a crucial impetus in increasing the user’s sense of belonging and ability to identify with a piece of technology owing to the technology’s design. During forced migratory journeys, where migrants experience constant distress, they tend to feel at ease when the interface for the technology they use is familiar and easy to access. Relying on existing technology platforms further reduces barriers, as downloading and navigating an entirely new platform can become an added burden in already precarious circumstances.

With social media, the ease of use and familiarity can often come as a Faustian bargain: the access to information and fulfilment of migrant needs might be through community-centric modes, but there is still a black box around data collection and processing. Owing to social media platforms operating on tenets of data monetisation and extraction, this bargain is perpetual, and one that is made by those migrating without much control or awareness of the terms. 

ResTech futures: Catalyst for changing narratives

The promise of social media allows for the democratisation of the flow of information in the public sphere. What ResTech offers is fundamentally what social media and communication channels make room for: a technology-mediated movement around redefining what it means to build for migrants and for marginalised communities who do not possess the prerogative of influencing narratives through mainstream media and communication channels. In this context, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Signal, Telegram, and so on, become forms of ResTech serendipitously. They take on a form that is beyond the inherently capitalistic intent behind their functionalities, allowing for unheard voices to exercise their autonomy in ways where they can control their narrative.

The opportunity with social media in filling a gap even within the ResTech ecosystem is considerable. One of our key insights from the taxonomy has been that most ResTech is built for integration efforts, usually in the Global North. As demonstrated in the figure below, ResTech efforts addressing gaps at the crisis or flux stage, or periods of transit, are sizeably fewer in number compared to efforts around integration. Social media fits well into this existing gap, creating forces of resistance and tools used to build out this counternarrative that is ResTech. 

Figure 1. ResTech across the phases of migration

All this is not to say that there are no risks attached to creating “alternative perceptions” through social media for people on the move. Social media has also created a marketplace for traffickers, as a consequence of allowing for access to all. These alternative publics are also affected by recurring cycles of misinformation and disinformation, abated through state and commercial interests, as a way to stir anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the promise of social media casts a wide net on how it can positively turn around migrant agency and negotiating power, creating a huge opportunity in exercising these spaces to catalyse the services that are the need of the hour. 

The way we see social media as a catalyst for migration management through the lens of the person on the move is an important manifestation of ResTech. While social media platforms might not be building for migrants, in consultation with migrants, or to empower migrants, they principally foster the creation of plurality in public spaces, which includes migrant-sensitive narratives, whether that is through information on visa applications or smuggler networks. These principles are what allow them to embody ResTech attributes in many ways, as discussed previously. While ResTech systems have facilitated this wave, social media platforms espouse ResTech attributes in many ways;  realistically embodying the needs of people on the move as a result. Like Fraser’s counterpublic, the inclusion of interests and expressions in social media goes towards the fulfilment of migrant aspirations through channels that they trust, wherein they can depict narratives that originate from within the community. It permits opinion formation that is not driven by top-down decision-making but exists alongside it. It allows for the inclusion of migrant-sensitive narratives, thus embodying key principles of ResTech. Functioning in parallel with ResTech systems, social media helps meet the needs of people on the move, acting complementarily to create blueprints for migrant-sensitive technologies and embedding narratives that fairly represent the migrant experience.