“Help on display”: how social media writes about internally displaced people and refugees

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An analysis of nearly eight thousand Facebook and Telegram posts published between January and July 2026 found that vulnerable groups rarely speak for themselves on social media. Instead, they are mostly spoken about by those who (supposedly) help them.

Nearly ten million Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. Yet on social media, internally displaced people are usually spoken about not by themselves but by others—officials, volunteers, and foreign governments. As of the end of April 2026, according to the Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture of Ukraine, 5.76 million Ukrainian refugees were living outside Ukraine. This figure does not include people currently residing in Russia. Another 4.65 million people (as of June 2026) left their homes but remained within Ukraine and have the status of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Internally displaced persons have the same rights and obligations as all other citizens of Ukraine. By contrast, Ukrainian citizens who have obtained refugee status or the status of a person in need of additional protection abroad have fewer rights than citizens of the countries where they have found refuge. Despite their different legal statuses and opportunities, internally displaced people and refugees share the common experience of losing their homes because of the war. They also share the need to adapt to a new place and often face a lack of understanding from people who have not been forced to leave their homes because of military action.

The Detector Media Research Center analyzed the similarities and differences in how users of the Ukrainian segments of Telegram and Facebook write about internally displaced people and refugees, as well as the broader discourse surrounding these groups.

We have previously studied manipulative narratives targeting Ukrainian women and men, internally displaced people, and refugees. For those earlier studies, search queries were designed to maximize the likelihood of finding publications matching manipulative and disinformation narratives. As a result, they also increased the number of publications related, for example, to manipulative narratives about women.

This time, we designed our search queries in the Semantrum search system to avoid focusing solely on manipulative content and instead made them as broad as possible. Our goal was to analyze different types of messages about internally displaced people and refugees as vulnerable population groups. We also examined who actually appears “in the frame” when social media writes about internally displaced people and refugees, who becomes the main character in these stories, and who remains in the background. We selected Facebook and Telegram because they are among the largest platforms and messaging services that Ukrainians use and where they consume news daily, according to media consumption studies.

The query in the Semantrum social media aggregation system covered publications from January 1, 2026, to July 3, 2026, with the source region specified as “Ukraine.” It retrieved 21,517 publications containing the keywords “refugees,” “IDPs,” “internally displaced people,” and “internally displaced persons” in both Ukrainian and Russian. The dataset included 12,913 Telegram posts and 8,604 Facebook posts. Two samples of 4,000 publications each were then created, one for each platform, with a 99% confidence interval and a 2% margin of error.

From these two samples, 169 publications were excluded because, although they contained the keywords, they did not focus on Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. We classified such publications as non-focus posts and excluded them from this analysis. The remaining 7,831 publications contained the necessary information, concerned the target groups, and formed the basis of this study. We refer to them as focus posts.

In this text, we use the term “refugee” to refer to all Ukrainian citizens who have received asylum in other countries, regardless of whether they officially hold refugee status or the status of a person in need of additional protection or temporary protection in their host country. We recognize the legal distinctions between these statuses. However, for the purposes of this study, we combine all three categories under the term “refugee,” based on the shared criterion of requiring asylum and protection from the states in which Ukrainian citizens are temporarily residing, despite the greater prevalence of the term “temporary protection” in the Ukrainian information space.

Data processing. Initial data processing was carried out using the Gemma 4 large language model with 26 billion parameters. The analysts developed 40 categories for data analysis, consisting primarily of binary (yes/no) questions covering topics such as the departure and return of refugees and internally displaced people, assistance from the state and other actors, threats facing these groups, subsidies and financial assistance, risks and barriers to integration, and related issues. The model returned the results in a structured format in Google Sheets. Analysts at the Detector Media Research Center then verified the results and reviewed the social media posts to describe and refine the findings produced by the large language model.

We classified the 7,831 posts and publications from both samples as “focus posts.” The first thing that stands out is that internally displaced people are discussed on social media several times more often than refugees. At the same time, explicit value judgments or evaluations—whether positive or negative—appear in only a minority of posts.