Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Background As the major host society for Syrian refugees, Türkiye has faced important problems in meeting refugees’ health needs and managing the strain on its healthcare system. We analyzed a large dataset of health-related Turkish tweets about Syrian refugees to examine the public opinion trends on refugee health. Methods We identified medical tweets from 2011 to 2022 from a corpus of 4.5 million Turkish tweets on Syrians in Türkiye using 26,000 unique annotated health-related tweets randomly selected and stratified across all years. Of these, 10,700 were annotated for topic and subtopic classification, and 10,000 for sentiment and stance analysis. We then fine-tuned a BERT-based Turkish LLM for classification. Tweets were classified into five main topics-Public Health and Disease Prevention, Financing and Coverage, Access to Medications and Pharmaceutical Services, Provision of Healthcare Services, and Human Resources-and 17 subtopics. Results 123,002 tweets were identified, with the annual numbers rising from 85 in 2011 to 41,352 in 2022, and health-related tweets rose from 1.1% to 5.4%. Sentiment analysis showed 69.9% of tweets were negative, 19.3% neutral, and 10.9% positive, with negativity rising from 31.0% in 2011 to 76.0% in 2022. Stance analysis revealed 60.8% of tweets were anti-refugee, 27.7% neutral, and 11.5% pro-refugee, with anti-refugee tweets rising from 15.8% to 70.4%. The main topics were Public Health and Disease Prevention (44.7%), Human Resources (18.4%), and Provision of Healthcare Services (18.3%). While “general healthcare services” was the dominant subtopic between 2011-2015, “fertility” became the most frequent from 2016 to 2022 Conclusions Health-related discussions about Syrians in Türkiye have intensified, marked by rising negativity and anti-refugee sentiment. These findings highlight the urgent need for targeted health communication strategies and inclusive policies that address the concerns of both refugee and host communities. Key messages • Negative attitudes toward Syrian refugees in health-related discussions on social media in Türkiye have substantially increased in recent years. • Strengthening public trust through targeted health communication is essential to address these attitudes and respond to concerns within the host population.
Authors: O Atac, A B Adeel, I E Atac
Institutions: Istanbul Medipol University, Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,181
OpenAlex ID: W7101383162
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