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Cited by 33Climate Change Communication and PerceptionSocial Media and PoliticsPublic Relations and Crisis Communication

Between calls for action and narratives of denial: Climate change attention structures on Twitter

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Meyer, Hendrik, Peach, Amelia Katelin, Guenther, Lars, Kedar, Hadas Emma, Brüggemann, Michael·2023·Media and Communication
DOI 10.17645/mac.v11i1.6111
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Abstract

The threats posed to society by climate change often fail to become priorities for voters and policymakers. Nevertheless, it has been shown that merely paying online attention to climate change can increase the perceived severity of the associated risks and thus encourage climate action. Therefore, we focus on public discourse on Twitter to explore the interplay of “triggers” and discursive features that stimulate attention to climate change. We collected data from 2017 to 2021, identified each year’s top five “peak” events of climate attention, and applied manual content (N = 2,500) and automated network analyses (N = ~17,000,000). The results show that while specific events and actors may not trigger and maintain attention permanently, there are discursive features (types of domains, discourses, users, and networks) that continuously shape attention to climate change. Debates are highly politicized and often call for action, criticize administrations, stress negative future scenarios, and controversially debate over the reality of climate change. Attention thereby is amplified within hybrid discourses which merge different triggers, being dominated by political, cultural, and journalistic media accounts: Political events trigger posts that stress the reality of climate change, whereas tweets on protests and cultural events are amplified if they call for action. However, antagonism and backlashes to such posts are essential features of the peaks investigated. Accordingly, attention is often connected to controversial debates regarding focusing events, polarizing figures (such as Greta Thunberg or Donald Trump), and the formation of counter-public networks. Which content is amplified highly depends on the subnetworks that users are situated in.

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  • Mainstream climate change discourses on Twitter call for action, criticize governments, and are discussed within relatively homogenous communities, while climate change denialists interact disproportionately with the mainstream and potentially aim to hijack these debates.

    “Meyer et al. (2023) show that, while mainstream discourses about climate change on Twitter call for action, criticize governments, and are discussed within relatively homogenous communities, climate change denialists are trying to interact to a disproportionately high degree with the mainstream and potentially aim to highjack these debates.”

    From When debates break apart: discursive polarization as a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication (2023) · cites this paper as Meyer et al., 2023

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  1. Abbar, S., Zanouda, T., Berti-Equille, L., & Borge- Holthoefer, J. (2016). Using Twitter to understand public interest in climate change: The case of Qatar. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1603.04010 · DOI
  2. Birkland, T. A. (1998). Focusing events, mobilization, and agenda setting. Journal of Public Policy, 18(1), 53-74.
  3. Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefeb- vre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: The- ory and Experiment, 2008(10), 1-12. https://doi.org/ 10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008 · DOI · Paper page
  4. Guenther, L., Brüggemann, M., & Elkobros, S. (2022). From global doom to sustainable solutions: Interna- tional news magazines' multimodal framing of our future with climate change. Journalism Studies, 23(1), 131-148.
  5. Newman, T. P. (2016). Tracking the release of IPCC AR5 on Twitter. Public Understanding of Science, 26(7), 815-825.
  6. Pfeffer, J., Mooseder, A., Hammer, L., Stritzel, O., & Gar- cia, D. (2022). This sample seems to be good enough! Assessing coverage and temporal reliability of Twit- ter's academic API. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ ARXIV.2204.02290 · DOI
  7. Ripberger, J. T., Jenkins-Smith, H. C., Silva, C. L., Carl- son, D. E., & Henderson, M. (2014). Social media and severe weather: Do tweets provide a valid indi- cator of public attention to severe weather risk com- munication? Weather, Climate, and Society, 6(4), 520-530.
  8. Tyagi, A., Babcock, M., Carley, K. M., & Sicker, D. C. (2020). Polarizing tweets on climate change. In R. Thomson, H. Bisgin, C. Dancy, A. Hyder, & M. Hussain (Eds.), Lec- ture notes in computer science. Social, cultural, and behavioral modeling (pp. 107-117). Springer.

Cited by

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Authors
Meyer, H., Peach, A. K., Guenther, L., Kedar, H. E., & Brüggemann, M.
Affiliations
Universität Hamburg (DE)
ORCID
Venue
Media and Communication
Publisher
Cogitatio
Published
2023-03-27
Volume
11
Issue
1
Pages
278-292
ISSN
2183-2439 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.17645/mac.v11i1.6111
OpenAlex
W4361004902
Cited by
33
References
31
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 1
FWCI
13.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Media and Communication (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Social Science Open Access Repository (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Cogitatio (Cogitatio) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC2037, 390683824)
  • Universität Hamburg
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
Keywords
climate change, Twitter, online attention, attention structure, politicization, climate action, denialism, counterpublics, polarization, backlash, Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump, protest, social media

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