report on the emerging landscape of digital responses to the refugee crisis

Their use of these smartphones is overwhelm-ingly focussed on social messaging apps: above all Facebook and WhatsApp, with small numbers additionally using others including Viber, Tel-egram, Line and WeChat. They are using these channels to communicate with their friends and family: those staying in the same place and those from whom they have been separated, having stayed behind in the home country or taken ref-uge elsewhere. WhatsApp messages are sent one-to-one and in groups, but as far as we saw these groups did not extend beyond a person’s circle of acquaintances. Our impression was that Facebook too was being used above all as a messaging service, much more than as a social network in which users produce and consume public and semi-public content.