Aylan Kurdi, Twitter and the short-lived outrage

Abstract

The photo of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian child who drowned after shipwrecking with his family, awakened international public concern in the face of a crisis that had already been established several months previously. This paper considers the behavior and interactivity taking place over Twitter with regards to the European migration crisis. Taking the accounts of the main influencers in this issue and analyzing their publications from August 30 to December 3 of 2015, the study seeks to demonstrate that the crisis was merely noise and was in fact invisible to public opinion. However, with the event of Kurdi’s photograph, setting off a temporary shitstorm that led to a rapid collective anesthetic, the events ultimately returned to their original invisibility.