Dismissive Affect in Anti-Immigration TikTok Content: The Construction of Social Crisis Through Platform Affordances and Affective Persuasion

TikTok has been widely gaining popularity in immigration discourse. Due to the platform's affordances and users’ increasingly short attention spans, it has become easier for content creators to spread information that is taken out of context, though not necessarily false, in support of negative narratives about immigration. Most research on this content assumes anger and fear are the primary emotional drivers of anti-immigrant framing online; this study asks instead what emotions and platform affordances actually dominate the most engaged content, regardless of that assumption. The study uses qualitative content analysis to examine 120 highly engaged videos (with more than 2000 likes) coded using a systematic, single-researcher qualitative scheme, to find out who is held responsible for immigration-related problems, whether those problems are framed as symbolic (cultural/demographic) or realistic (safety/economic) threats, and which evidentiary and emotional strategies dominate. Contrary to the suggestions of the earlier studies assuming fear and anger domination, the findings show that a dismissive affective register (sarcasm, disappointment and irritation), communicated largely through visual anecdote and textual overlay, is the dominant pattern in constructing immigrants as a scapegoat in social crises. This attribution is individualised rather than institutional. This is a case study of one algorithmically curated TikTok feed rather than a platform-wide sample. The findings contribute to research on digital manipulation and platform-mediated political discourse by showing that affective persuasion here operates through selective decontextualisation and dismissive affect rather than through falsehood or overt hostility.