Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
As the number of forced migrants continues to raise, friction between migrants and locals has become a pressing political issue globally. These discussions increasingly play out on social media, where the digitalization of interactions and engagement-based algorithms are often blamed for spreading misinformation, increasing polarization, and inflaming existing tensions. Yet social media also offers an unparalleled platform for immediate, low-cost, large-scale interventions to reduce intergroup hostility. This experiment aims to test the effects of naturalistic exposure to varied social media content on locals’ attitudes towards refugees in Turkey. As host to the world’s largest refugee population, Turkey has seen anti-refugee attitudes become entrenched across the political spectrum despite intense polarization. The study design takes advantage of this political landscape to test message vs. messenger effects alongside digital intergroup contact, exposing participants to ‘digital contact’ with content from refugee accounts paired with political content from either political ingroup or outgroup ‘messengers’.
