Are they helping, or just building their own image? New research shows how global corporations talk about refugees on social media

Nowadays, large companies are expected not only to generate profits, but also to "do good" and address social issues. A new study by David Ongenaert from IKSŽ and Anna Pstrokońska from Erasmus University Rotterdam focused on how five multinational giants – Google, McKinsey & Company, Airbnb, Starbucks, and IKEA – communicated about forced migration on YouTube and Twitter between 2015 and 2022. The research revealed that corporate communication often balances on a fine line between a sincere effort to help and marketing aimed at strengthening their own brand, often reproducing stereotypical images of refugees.

One of the main findings of the study, published in the International Journal of Business Communication, is that corporations often try to break down stereotypes by portraying refugees as heroes, heroines, diligent students, or neighbors. This approach is intended to elicit empathy from Western audiences and show that these people are "just like us" – for example, when an Airbnb campaign presents a refugee as the ideal roommate. Although this seems positive, the authors of the study warn that this strategy can be double-edged. It often reduces complex human destinies to simple success stories and creates unrealistic expectations, thereby unintentionally excluding those who do not fit into this image of the "perfect and productive" refugee.

On the other hand, companies paradoxically also use the opposite extreme – portraying refugees as passive, nameless victims who desperately need help. This narrative of "rescuer and rescued" appears especially when a company wants to emphasize the importance of its products or financial donations. In the technology sector, human suffering is often reduced to a technical problem that can be miraculously solved by a new app or internet connection, with the people themselves becoming mere backdrops for corporate generosity. Twitter in particular shows a highly depersonalized form of corporate communication, where human stories are often replaced by the stark language of crisis management. Posts by companies such as Starbucks often do not show people's faces, but only company logos and information about financial donations. Refugees are thus transformed into invisible objects of CSR campaigns, and forced migration is reduced to a "crisis" that needs to be effectively resolved.

“While there’s no such thing as 'the' perfect representation of people who fled, and any representation can be criticized in one way or another, we also shouldn't be too relativistic and view any representation as inaccurate or insufficiently moral, thereby preventing us from adapting our own representational practices,” argues David Ongenaert.  “I believe it’s important to present people - especially, but not exclusively, vulnerable and often stigmatized populations like people who fled - with integrity, morality, and nuance, including in strategic communication from companies. People are highly multi-layered, complex, and often also intriguing figures, and therefore should not be represented with simple clichés. It’s essential to ask the represented populations how they would like to be represented, and to collaborate with them to co-create communication and representations in integer, non-tokenistic, and participatory ways," Ongenaert adds.

The study shows that corporate humanitarian aid is a complex area where the desire to help clashes with commercial logic. The authors of the study therefore recommend that companies communicate more thoughtfully and comprehensively in the future, ideally in collaboration with the people affected by migration themselves, in order to avoid simplification and instead contribute to a deeper understanding of the reality of forced migration.

The research is available in Open Access here.