Özet:

The images become the vehicle for online mass participation of ordinary users to influence media and set the agenda on specific topics among the public. The monopoly of traditional mass media institutions of information sources has been shattered through the horizontal social media practices of knowledge production and dissemination. In this age of truth skepticism, the article examines visual communication methods that activate knowledge production by taking a case study of the host communities’ social media interaction on the Syrian immigrant population living under temporary protection in Turkey. The goal of this article is to identify the role of the information mediators such as clips, memes, GIFs, and videos as image-based news, audiovisual message, to construct arguments in social media. To study contrasting approaches to Syrian refugees in Turkey I further collect images shared under two antagonistic online groupings under the hashtags #ülkemdesuriyeliistemiyorum (I don’t want Syrians in my country) and #suriyelilerkardeşimizdir (Syrians are our siblings). I conducted the multimodal discourse analysis on this visual inventory. By this, this research-based article contributes to the studies on online participatory practices of knowledge production through visual communication. As such users who share images of Syrians in Turkey have concerns about the objectivity and impartiality of their claims. This analysis demonstrates that the legitimacy of Syrians’ status in Turkey depends on various parameters that users in social media refer to through the display of visual evidence.

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