Are Digital Diaspora Communities Politically Engaged Online?

This blog entry is an update on our ongoing research into digital diaspora communities and how they are using social medias and technologies to engage with their country/culture of origin and within their new host/home country. In this quick snapshot we endeavor to partly answer the question of digital diaspora’s levels of political engagement in the host country and country/culture of origin.

The answer would seem to be “depends”. It would seem to depend on a number of factors which include; size of diaspora community in a given nation, number of generations, political atmosphere in the country of origin and the political climate and structure within the host nation.

Generational Engagement
In host countries where a diaspora community is fairly well established with at least three generations existing, we find that the second and third generation will tend to be more vocal in political issues relating to their country of origin from first generation arrivals. This tends to change when a diaspora community has recently (within a 10 year period) seen rapid growth due to conflict or humanitarian crises in the host nation. The recently displaced will tend to become more vocal within their host nation.

The Citizenship & Power of Influence Equation
Where a diaspora community is established for two to three generations and the majority of the community has either dual citizenship or adopted the citizenship of their host nation, diaspora communities would appear to feel more stable in protests and political engagement. For example, the Tamil community in Toronto, Canada, is well-established and with a large number being Canadian citizens, they hold significant voting power in two federal political ridings. They were active in urging Canadian government support and policy changes regarding Sri Lanka during the civil conflict period.

Applicability to Host Nation Political Influence
It is rather hard to participate in a protest when you are 3,000 miles away. Diaspora influence politically is most often through influencing host nation foreign policy. For their country of origin it is usually a support role through remittances, but also by providing materiel where possible and “hosting” revolutionary or anti-government content. We know that during the failed “Green Revolution” of 2009 in Iran that less than 10% of the “tweets” coming from Twitter actually originated in Iran. Of the 92% or so outside Iran our research indicates less than 40% were by Iranian digital diaspora. Perhaps the revolution wasn’t tweeted after all?

More Questions Than  Answers
Digital diaspora are politically active but as the graph indicates below, they are focused on other topics as well. This graph indicates time periods where there was little political unrest or major political events taking place in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan and Haiti. We do note a significant spike in digital diaspora activity just before and  during a crisis period. Which begs the question “do digital diaspora contribute to creating or driving activity back in their country of origin?” We are working on that, but have no definitive answer at this point. We took a sample size of 1,500 individually identified diaspora in Canada, USA and England analyzing text in English and native languages with our AI Engine and human analysts.

Methodology
Complete details can be found here on our page providing details about our digital diaspora project. For more information or questions you may have, please see our contact page or email giles-at-mediabadger.com.

This information and content is Copyright 2011, MediaBadger Public Affairs Ltd. (Canada) and MediaBadger Ltd. (UK). Content may be linked to or otherwise shared with attribution.