WAPOR 76th Annual Conference

Abstract:

Climate change is a global phenomenon with multidimensional and widespread consequences, which has received considerable media attention in recent decades. Climate change is considered one of the most important challenges faced by the world not only in the present but also in the future. Both scientific and political communities have recognized the urgency of addressing the impacts of this phenomenon, and understanding how people perceive and engage with it. In the digital media environment, the emergence of climate change information on social media, especially visual content shared by users, has changed how individuals understand and perceive the phenomenon, how it encourages collective action, and shape’s public opinion. Previous work has mostly focused on qualitative analyses of a small number of the most iconic images related to climate change from Western countries. We currently also lack a better understanding and comparative perspective on how people react to climate change images shared on social media.

In this context, the aim of this study is to answer the following research question: To what extent does the framing of climate change imagery on social media influences people’s attitudes towards climate change and how does this vary in different regions of the world with varying degrees of exposure to the negative impacts of climate change? This study adopts a computational approach combining framing theory with automated image and text analysis to examine more than two million of images, tweets, and replies shared by Twitter users during the period 2019 – 2022. For the data collection, we sampled all tweets that included an image and the term “climate change” or the hashtag “#climatechange” in English, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. We used the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training model to analyse and classify the images, and different text analysis techniques to process and explore the Tweet texts and comments. Results reveal regional differences in the distribution of identified frames’ salience, as well as a concentration of images around topics related to the consequences of climate change. Furthermore, these differences not only concern the type of visual content shared, but also how people react to it. Here, we generally see that regions with the highest exposure to the impacts of climate change express more concern and exhibit more engagement with the issue. This research contributes to a better understanding of the role of social media in climate change communication and how this affect people’s opinion on this topic. It not only expands the scope of previous work, but also provides valuable information on the potential of images as a tool for identifying how people perceive and portray climate change on social media.

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