Social Media And Ict Use By Refugees, Immigrants And Ngos: A Literature Overview
Social Media And Ict Use By Refugees, Immigrants And Ngos: A Literature Overview

Author(s): Bilgen Türkay
Subject(s): Media studies, Civil Society, Migration Studies, ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Refugees; NGOs; social media; ICT; literature overview;
Summary/Abstract: The ubiquity of social media and information communication technologies (ICT) has a tremendous impact on refugees and immigrants’ experiences (Cassar et al., 2016). Despite this potential impact, we know very little about the experiences of immigrants and refugees with these technologies. Furthermore, to have a complete understanding, we need to investigate how NGOs utilize ICTs and social media in their work with refugees and immigrants. This paper presents a literature overview on these topics to answer the following research questions: what are the main reasons refugees and immigrant use social media and ICT? What are the barriers that refugees encounter in using social media and ICT? How do NGOs use social media and ICT for helping refugees and immigrants? What are the barriers of using and social media and ICT by NGOs? We found that immigrants and refugees use ICT and social media for various reasons including communication, information seeking, content creation and sharing, entertainment and escaping, as well as for surviving. Among the barriers are low digital literacies, limited access to new technologies and refugees’ lack of trust in information resources. When it comes to NGOs reasons, we found for helping to reach vast amount refugees and immigrants, organizing aid campaigns, defending refugees or immigrants’ rights as well as recording the statistics of refugees, immigrants or aids. Finally, we found that the barriers NGOs face with ICT and social media use are receiving the trustable data from internet, fear of information sharing by vulnerable refugees and immigrants with NGOs and possibility of failure of the data systems NGO’s use.

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