The Elephant in the Feed. Framing Contests, Circulation, and Discursive Power in French Social Media Immigration Debates

Thesis defense of Katharina Tittel, Doctoral programme in Sociology, Friday, January 30th 2026.  

The Elephant in the Feed. Three Essays on Framing Contests, Circulation, and Discursive Power in French Social Media Immigration Debates

Jury members: Jean-Philippe Cointet (PhD Supervisor - Medialab), Tristan Mattelart (Université Paris II), Rahsaan Maxwell (New York University),  Barbara Pfetsch (Freie Universität, Berlin), Ettore Recchi (PhD Supervisor - CRIS), Hélène Thiollet (CNRS, CERI).

This thesis investigates how dominant and alternative narratives about immigration are produced, circulated, and contested in France’s hybrid media system, shaped by interactions between various actors on digital platforms and traditional newspapers.

Using a mixed-methods approach, it combines computational analysis of immigration-related press coverage and X (formerly Twitter) data with interviews with key contributors. 
Across three articles, it addresses who becomes audible in public debates, and how ideology, institutional logics, power structures, and intersectional inequalities influence which voices and frames prevail.

Article 1 examines the discursive and visual construction of “the migrant” and its intersection with institutional practices, focusing on urban camps in the Paris region as an emblematic site. It reveals how young, racialized men in precarious situations become a hypervisible face of ‘immigration’ due to media and institutional logics.

Article 2 explores the circulation of migration narratives on French Twitter, emphasizing the discursive power of far-right actors and highlighting how strategic source sharing functions as a rhetorical resource. This article finds a strong asymmetry in activity across the ideological spectrum with hyperactive rightist and far-right users demonstrating concentrated influence. Far-right users amplify both mainstream and fringe sources to pursue “defensive” agendas, shifting public debate boundaries and legitimizing exclusionary narratives. Sharing partisan and mainstream news serves to counter perceived censorship, pressure mainstream media, and enhance the credibility of defensive publics.

Article 3 examines the uneven distribution of discursive power on X, contrasting media and political professionals with non-institutional users from traditionally marginalised groups. This article distinguishes between consistent and episodic discursive power, showing how far-right users and media and political professionals consolidate their influence through sustained visibility, while in isolated moments of “episodic resonance”, young, racialized, or working-class users can briefly reach wide audiences, often through humour or ironic criticisms of dominant representations. However, even these moments of “isolated resonance” come with exposure to identity-based violence and emotional labour.

Together, the three articles contribute to a relational understanding of racialised media representations of ‘immigration’: one that links the symbolic construction of ‘the migrant’ with underlying institutional logics (Article 1), another that details the circulation and amplification of exclusionary narratives (Article 2), and the third one that highlights the unequal distribution of discursive power and affective labour in digital counterpublics (Article 3).