Climate Activists and Counter-Activists: Competing Cascades on Social Media

• In Event: Cross-Platform Approaches to Online Harms

Abstract

Climate activists are increasingly turning to social media in their advocacy efforts. Despite its clear advantages, especially in harnessing the networked aspects of social movement organization and mobilization, using social media for climate advocacy comes with consequential drawbacks. Climate activists routinely face harassment on social media, often in the form of hateful speech or threats with the intention of causing emotional distress or harm to the targeted individual. These action are effective forms of climate obstruction that poses significant challenges to climate movements due to their deterrent effects. Prior studies on climate obstruction have explored both individual-level grassroots harassment and formally organized forms of climate obstruction on social media, primarily in terms of content. However, they have yet to explicitly consider within-group and inter-group dynamics between [counter-activists] and climate activists, and how these differ by the affordances of different social media platforms. Using machine learning to measure conversational content and a network approach to understanding cascade dynamics, we explore these dynamics as competing conversation cascades on different social media platforms. Specifically, we use data from Twitter and Tiktok to study activity and content escalation between two competing sides. Our analysis underscores the importance of considering platform affordances in understanding the nuances in this dynamic.

Authors

• Sonja M. Savolainen, University of Helsinki

• Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, George Mason University