Influence of Social Media on Migrant’s Decision Making

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Along with ties with others, social media have fostered people’s migration ambitions. Even those who had no aspirations of traveling abroad were motivated to migrate due to the availability and accessibility of information via social media. People's comprehension, awareness, and interest in other locations could be advanced through geographically and socially enhanced online interactions with peers, relatives, and acquaintances, widening their geographic perspectives and bringing the world within. (Thulin and Vilhelmson, 2016.). Because personal knowledge of locations and their potential local benefits is essential in migration decision-making (Fischer and Malmberg, 2001), for example, by assisting in the search for an apartment or employment, social media have become increasingly valuable for facilitating the migration process (Komito, 2011; Dekker and Engbersen, 2014).

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Considering the specific points of the study participants’ decision making to migrate, I noticed that most of them had long term intentions of travel, not to Finland specifically (in the initial stages), but to leave their home countries at a point in their adult lives to have a change of environment, get multi-cultural experiences and further education. Traveling out of your comfort zones, especially to foreign countries, helps an individual acquire multiple cultural backgrounds. They can then learn more from diverse populations, which eventually shapes their career connections and boosts physical ties - an essential aspect of human existence and development. However, the decision to migrate to a particular country (Finland), out of several other options, the migrants were convinced about their information about the host country. Be it financial, social, educational, etc. All the information they had most likely matched their career objectives, and they believed it was the best choice. A respondent shared more insight by stating the following:

Ok, I was working in the customer service like I was tired of my job at that time, and I thought it was time for a change. I’ve been planning to move for my master's. Still, I also wanted to go for a program that wouldn’t cost … so I wanted something that would fit my budget. I wanted quality education at an affordable cost, so that made Finland particularly attractive for me.

According to some respondents, the pre-migration information they acquired through social media was not enough to influence their migration decision. Although they had most of the information they needed at hand through the use of social media, they wanted to get a more practical experience from people they already knew or were yet to establish ties with and preferably in their home country persons. This way, they then consider their information rather enough for decision-making. These sets of people question the credibility of the information they had. It is not strange that they wanted to confirm from ties they had (friends/relatives or acquaintances already in Finland) because social media may be full of misinformation as much as it provided people with a lot of readily available information. The significant

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concerns noticed from their social media involvement in their information acquisition and decision-making phases were dealing with misinformation/fraud. A respondent said:

It wasn’t all that enough because at times I’m on social media when you’re getting specific information from there, there is some kind of little fear in certain details because of bad people;

people who are fraud, so at times you don’t trust them 100%, so the mind was divided into 50/50,

so I need to also require from other people who have already traveled say friends because I have some friends who are already in Finland, Canada, Australia, so when I plan to move towards all these places, I’ll say social media partly contributed. Then there are other factors because that made.

Most West African migrants in Finland had their migration information from social media. This is because social media has a lot of information that an individual may need in any aspect of their life’s decision-making process. One’s ability to segregate that information is key to gaining good news from bad ones. Not everyone may be able to do this. Therefore, it is crucial to ask people to confirm such information, which raises concerns regarding an individual's information. There were disparities in their concerns about social media, while others had some problems about the information they acquired, and some also had no worries over misinformation. One of the participants mentioned that he trusted information he encountered on social media. Everything he was doing was genuine, and he felt no need to fear. He made the following statements:

They were relevant enough… you need to verify information from social, and then after verifying the data, you can then go ahead to make your decisions.

Regarding how social media influenced respondents’ migration decision-making, I found that social media positively impacted migrants’ decision-making. It provided them with a lot of information and facilitated their decisions to migrate to their host country. Although with few concerns, I believe it gave

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them more information to make concrete migration decisions. A respondent shared more insight by stating the following:

It influenced me positively …in the sense that it began the genesis of everything based on the information I received. The how it impacted me because it gave me a change of mind. Because when you have not gotten access to certain information, you don’t have the idea. But the idea

started when I began seeing all these things. I didn’t know there were such opportunities. Social media generated an impact on me by letting me know that the preconceptions that I was having that you need to be a rich person before you can even travel outside. Still, with the help of information that I inquired from social media, I realized the idea I was having already wasn’t so.

The decision to migrate to Finland out of many options had not been easy to make initially. Moreover, the access to information via social media influenced migrants’ decision-making positively to migrate to Finland. Evidence from the last decade, according to authors like Thulin and Vilhelmson (2014), Tabor and Milfont (2013), and Dekker et al. (2016) have reiterated that social media is progressively intertwined into the different phases of the migration decision-making process and that Internet-based knowledge about labor, accommodation and access to higher education in foreign areas increases the willingness to migrate.

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