Polarization of climate politics results from partisan sorting: Evidence from Finnish Twittersphere

Chen, Ted Hsuan Yun; Salloum, Ali; Gronow, Antti; Ylä‐Anttila, Tuomas; Kivelä, Mikko

doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102348

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Second, by focusing on a specific event, we ensure that tweet content is thematically focused (in our case on climate politics) and that the network of interactions is sufficiently connected to allow robust network analysis (which is not always possible with sampled datasets 32 ). This event focus is a common feature of previous climate communication studies on Twitter (for example, on the IPCC report 12 or the Finnish elections 15 ). For a review of the benefits of studying specific events or controversies, see ref.…”

Section: Ideological Polarization During Copmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Of course, Twitter is not directly analogous to public opinion, and our results probably derive from a combination of the platform's well-documented tendency to foster polarization and the broader contexts for climate politics [8][9][10] . However, many studies highlight the importance of Twitter (and social media in general) as a critical tool for studying climate communication 1,[11][12][13][14][15][16] , political polarization 6,17 and misinformation 18 . Beyond social media, a broad literature considers the polarization and politicization of climate issues using other and COP26 than in the intermediate years.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Growing polarization around climate change on social media

et al. 2022

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Climate change and political polarization are two of the twenty-first century’s critical socio-political issues. Here we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarization during COP26, following low polarization between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this increase is driven by growing right-wing activity, a fourfold increase since COP21 relative to pro-climate groups. Finally, we identify a broad range of ‘climate contrarian’ views during COP26, emphasizing the theme of political hypocrisy as a topic of cross-ideological appeal; contrarian views and accusations of hypocrisy have become key themes in the Twitter climate discussion since 2019. With future climate action reliant on negotiations at COP27 and beyond, our results highlight the importance of monitoring polarization and its impacts in the public climate discourse.

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Section: Ideological Polarization During Copmentioning

confidence: 96%

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confidence: 99%

Growing polarization around climate change on social media

et al. 2022

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“…1 https://twitter.com/ Twitter is also a popular tool researchers use to investigate climate change opinions [11]. Studies have shown that data from Twitter are relevant to climate events and valuable for measuring opinion polarization [9], [12], [13]. Due to the absence of large annotated datasets in different climate change-related topics, most previous works took an unsupervised learning fashion [14], [15] to classify tweets into topic categories.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saving Earth One Tweet at a Time through the Lens of Artificial Intelligence

Duong

Liu

Mao

et al. 2022

2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

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The impacts of climate change and global warming have become more visible globally because of the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, abnormal heatwaves, and other climate crises. Besides the traditional survey method, it is benecial to automatically distillate climate change opinions from social platforms to measure public reactions quickly. We investigate how to organize climate change opinions on Twitter into meaningful categories to support perspective summarizing tasks. We nd that merely using the available taxonomy for this task is ineffective; hence we must consider the entire text content. We recommend ve high-level categories (Root cause, Impact, Mitigation, Politics or Policy, Others) and assemble ClimateTweets, a dataset with category and polarity labels. In addition, we construct category classication and polarity detection tasks with a range of opinion mining baselines. The experimental results show that both tasks are challenging for existing models. We release the ClimateTweets dataset to facilitate investigation in public opinion mining using text content and articial intelligent methods. We hope this study could pave the way for future studies in the climate change domain.

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“…Previous work has found that the polarisation is particularly high amongst science-literate individuals [3], and that views can be strongly influenced by politicised content from the media [4] and corporate action [5]. Other studies investigate attitudes to climate change and polarisation on social media [6][7][8][9]. In most cases, they focus on interactions during a specific event such as Pearce et al [10] on the 2014 IPCC report, and Hopke and Hestres [11] on COP21, while Williams et al [12] study a particular four month time period in 2013.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In most cases, they focus on interactions during a specific event such as Pearce et al [10] on the 2014 IPCC report, and Hopke and Hestres [11] on COP21, while Williams et al [12] study a particular four month time period in 2013. Others, such as Chen et al [7] focus on a particular region, focusing on climate polarisation in the Finnish Twittersphere, and the alignment of climate ideology with other political views. However, by focusing on relatively short time periods of a few weeks or months, these studies have not focused on the evolving nature of climate polarisation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing polarisation around climate change on social media

Falkenberg¹,

Galeazzi²,

Torricelli³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Climate change and political polarisation are two of the critical social and political issues of the 21st century. However, their interaction remains understudied. Here, we investigate the online discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP) using social media data from 2014 to 2021. First, we highlight that cross-platform engagement peaked during COP26. Second, focusing on Twitter, we reveal low ideological polarisation between COP20 -COP25, with a large increase in polarisation during COP26. Finally, we show that this is driven by growing rightwing engagement (a 4-fold increase since COP21) and find no evidence of polarisation driven by individuals moving between ideological groups. With future climate action reliant on negotiations at COP27 and onwards, our results highlight the importance of monitoring polarisation in the public climate discourse and how this may impact political action.

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Polarization of climate politics results from partisan sorting: Evidence from Finnish Twittersphere

Cited by 28 publications

References 65 publications

Growing polarization around climate change on social media

Growing polarization around climate change on social media

Saving Earth One Tweet at a Time through the Lens of Artificial Intelligence

Growing polarisation around climate change on social media

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