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The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform’s affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok’s features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.

Knowledge about science and technology has become increasingly important in this age of digital information overload. It is also becoming increasingly important to understand what contributes to scientific learning, including information sources and trust in those sources. In this study, we develop and test a multivariate model to explain scientific knowledge based on past theories on learning from the news from the fields of political communication, sociology, and media psychology. We focus on the impact of sources-by platform, such as television and online, and by expertise, such as scientists and the media-in understanding what predicts scientific knowledge. The results show that interest in science not only directly predicts knowledge but also has indirect effects on knowledge through its effects on Internet use, confidence in the press, and perception of scientists. In addition, distrust on the news sources is an important pathway to learning about science.

Studies about mass media framing have found divergent levels of influence on public opinion; moreover, the evidence suggests that issue attributes can contribute to this difference. In the case of climate change, studies have focused exclusively on developed countries, suggesting that media influence perceptions about the issue. This study presents one of the first studies of media coverage in a developing country. It examines newspapers' reporting in Peru during the Fifth Latin America, Caribbean and European Union Summit in May 2008. The study focuses on the frames and the sources to provide an initial exploratory assessment of the coverage. The results show that the media relied mostly on government sources, giving limited access to dissenting voices such as environmentalists. Additionally, a prominence of "solutions" and "effects" frames was found, while "policy" and "science" frames were limited. The results could serve as a reference point for more comprehensive studies.