Active Facebook Users Prefer News Stories Framing Refugees and Immigrants as an Economic and National Problem

After the refugee crisis a new frame of ‘economization’ has become part of the media coverage of refugees and immigrants where they are pictured as a macro-economic burden. It has, however, never been demonstrated whether this framing has also reached media users. In this explorative study, it is shown that news shared on Facebook about economic problems of having refugees and immigrants in Denmark, rather than about the refugee crisis of 2014-2015, creates a high number of interactions (likes, comments, and shares) on Facebook in 2015 but much more pronounced in 2016. In the conclusion it is discussed why these findings are important to our understanding of the economic coverage of the refugee crisis.