Hybrid mediation of ‘the refugee crisis’ by radical nationalist groups Suomi Ensin and Rajat kiinni!

The large-scale arrival of asylum seekers and refugees to Europe in 2015 stirred media debates, changed political orientations and agendas, and developed new kinds of mobilizations. Among those mobilizations, we have witnessed a surge of anti-immigration groups. In Finland, several groups emerged, among the most prominent were Suomi Ensin (Finland First) and Rajat Kiinni! (Close the Borders!). These two groups were among the most vocal on Facebook, receiving salient mainstream coverage until the end of 2015. We explore how these two far-right anti-immigration groups presented and (re-)framed the Finnish context of ‘the refugee crisis’ on Facebook. We focus on the emotive narrative that welds real and imagined developments into a story of an encompassing ‘crisis’ (Moffitt, 2016) and the trajectories through which these reinformative far-right framings found their way into to the mainstream media and public debate at large between September and November 2015. For this purpose, we have collected all the Facebook posts during the peaking months of the refugee crisis mediatisation in Finland (from September to November 2015) in the Facebook page of Suomi Ensin and the Facebook group of Rajat Kiinni!. Analysing this data, we identify what kinds of content - URLs, pictures, videos and memes - are used by the page administrators and the group members (the latter being ethically more challenging to study) to ‘perform crisis’, where this content originates in, and what types of action the groups seek to incite among their members.