ABSTRACT
The article critically revisits Berry’s acculturation framework through the lens of ‘digital anchoring’ in the Facebook discourse of Polish migrants in Scotland. Drawing on 852 anonymised posts from four large Facebook groups (January–June 2025), we combine qualitative thematic coding with quantitative lexical analysis to explore how migrants construct psychosocial footholds—symbolic, relational, cultural, moral and functional—within digitally mediated spaces. While Berry’s typologies (integration, separation, assimilation and marginalisation) offer a starting point, they inadequately capture the fluidity, hybridity and domain-specific nature of adaptation revealed in online interactions. The concept of anchoring (Grzymała-Kazłowska 2015) is extended here to account for digital performativity, affective expression and platform-mediated visibility. Findings show that political debates act as symbolic anchors through ideological confrontation; solidarity exchanges and care requests serve as relational anchors; heritage preservation fosters intergenerational anchors; charity initiatives enable moral anchoring; and pragmatic engagement with Scottish institutions reflects hybrid functional anchoring. Adaptation emerges as selective and uneven—strong in relational and practical domains, limited in symbolic integration with the host society. Facebook functions not only as a site for discussing belonging but as an environment where it is actively produced, negotiated and contested. We propose ‘digital anchoring’ as a framework for understanding migrant adaptation in transnational, platform-mediated contexts.