“The Netherlands is the Netherlands no more”.

This paper explores how far-right parties instrumentalize migration and migrants to evoke a state of collective alarm in society during the election period, through an in-depth analysis of moral panic production. Moral panic prevails as social groups are demarcated into an in- and out-group through symbolic bordering building on the us-versus-them paradigm. The Other, in this case the migrant, is categorized as the folk devil, better understood as the threat to society. This study specifically focusses on TikTok posts and tweets of Dutch far right political parties, namely Forum voor Democratie (FVD) and Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), and their respective figure heads Thierry Baudet and Geert Wilders collected using Discourse Centred Online Ethnography to investigate what strategies are employed and how digital affordances are used in moral panic spread around migration. Based on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, this study demonstrates that far-right parties amplify negative stereotypes circulating public discourse, including the migrant as disruptor of public order, ignitor of socio-cultural change and exploiter narratives. These stereotypes highlight differences and reinforce the boundaries of the in- and out-group. Furthermore, they heighten fear on the premise of what might be lost as well as stress the unpredictability that comes with the influx of migrants to articulate anti-(im)migration ideology in support of their political incentives, such as restoration of national identity. Despite the contentious nature of migration, this study argues that PVV and FVD construct fear discourses around migration by highlighting the direct negative impact migration has on the livelihoods of Dutch citizens, covering and magnifying events that stress deviancy of the out-group, which gives the in-group a feeling of protective negligence by the government. Next to that, it foreshadows fearful predicaments that come with migration endangering traditional ways of living, which legitimizes regulation and advocating for (institutional) change. This paper concludes that more established platforms, such as X, encourage top-down antipathy, and the up-and-coming platforms, like TikTok, are reshaping public opinion on migration from the bottom-up, thereby utilizing the interactive participatory platform tools to diversify the representation of the networked and therefore contested threat.