‘Immigration Will Destroy Us’ and Other Talking Points

About the report

“‘Immigration Will Destroy Us’ and Other Talking Points” is the culmination of three years of original research at Define American looking at the impact, tactics, and reach of anti-immigration narratives on YouTube. Digital media, particularly on social platforms, is radically shaping our national conversations about the most important social justice issues of our time. At Define American, we have been watching this discourse closely, because we understand the power of narrative in shaping culture, and ultimately in impacting people’s lives, especially in marginalized communities.

In September of 2019, we established the Digital Storytelling pillar at Define American, dedicated to building data-driven tools for shifting the immigration narrative in digital spaces. In partnership with our Research pillar, this report and accompanying toolkit marks the first public resource developed for this work and towards this goal. We acknowledge the wealth of scholarship and work being done in digital spaces to combat the spread of mis- and disinformation networks, and we believe narrative change organizations such as Define American have an important role to play. We view this research report as a contribution to this growing field of scholarship, and the toolkit as a set of tangible recommendations for content creators, putting the research into action.

These findings and recommendations are intended to be the beginning of a larger conversation around coalition-based work, collectively building a better story for immigrants online.

Key findings

For a snapshot of our key findings from the research report, please download our overview and watch the video below.

The Great Replacement Network audience landscape

This visualization shows the audience relationship among the Great Replacement Network (GRN) channels. The audience relationship was determined by a relevance score, which factored in audience affinity (likelihood of an audience member to subscribe to both channels) and audience overlap (the number of audience members who watch both channels). Each of the channels in the network had other GRN channels within its top twenty audience relevance scores.

The result is this visualization, showing the interconnected audience landscape of the GRN. The size of the circle equals total audience engagement for the lifetime of the channel. The thickness of the line represents the audience affinity between the channels. The channels within the GRN are multicolored, and appear in bold. Channels with shared audience relevance scores are represented in orange. Hover over a dot to see the channel’s name.

Contact the team

Research Inquiries
Sarah E. Lowe
Director, Research + Impact
sarah@defineamerican.com

Partnership Inquiries
Shauna Siggelkow
Director, Digital Storytelling
shauna@defineamerican.com