Structure and Content of the Discourse on Climate Change in the Blogosphere: The Big Picture

Elgesem, Dag; Steskal, Ľuboš; Diakopoulos, Nicholas

doi:10.4324/9781315403625-3

Cited by 29 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…The climate change misinformation network [1: Bjornberg et al, 2017; 2: Dunlap & McCright, 2011; 3: McCright & Dunlap, 2011; 4: Dunlap, 2013; 5: Schafer, 2015; 6: Ding et al, 2011; 7: Elgesem et al, 2015; 8: Sharman, 2014; 9: Matthews, 2015; 10: Boussalis & Coan, 2018; 11: Elsasser & Dunlap, 2013; 12: Farrell, 2016a; 13: Farrell, 2016b; 14:Farrell, 2019; 15: Brulle, 2014; 16: Goldberg et al, 2020]…”

Section: Who Is Involved In Spreading Misinformation About Climate Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online misinformation about climate change

Treen

Williams

O’Neill

2020

WIREs Climate Change

228

103

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Policymakers, scholars, and practitioners have all called attention to the issue of misinformation in the climate change debate. But what is climate change misinformation, who is involved, how does it spread, why does it matter, and what can be done about it? Climate change misinformation is closely linked to climate change skepticism, denial, and contrarianism. A network of actors are involved in financing, producing, and amplifying misinformation. Once in the public domain, characteristics of online social networks, such as homophily, polarization, and echo chambers—characteristics also found in climate change debate—provide fertile ground for misinformation to spread. Underlying belief systems and social norms, as well as psychological heuristics such as confirmation bias, are further factors which contribute to the spread of misinformation. A variety of ways to understand and address misinformation, from a diversity of disciplines, are discussed. These include educational, technological, regulatory, and psychological‐based approaches. No single approach addresses all concerns about misinformation, and all have limitations, necessitating an interdisciplinary approach to tackle this multifaceted issue. Key research gaps include understanding the diffusion of climate change misinformation on social media, and examining whether misinformation extends to climate alarmism, as well as climate denial. This article explores the concepts of misinformation and disinformation and defines disinformation to be a subset of misinformation. A diversity of disciplinary and interdisciplinary literature is reviewed to fully interrogate the concept of misinformation—and within this, disinformation—particularly as it pertains to climate change. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

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Section: Who Is Involved In Spreading Misinformation About Climate Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online misinformation about climate change

Treen

Williams

O’Neill

2020

WIREs Climate Change

228

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One would expect the polarization in the blog posts to be visible in the link patterns. Previous research has shown that there are more links connecting blogs that share the same position on climate change than there are links connecting blogs with opposing positions (Elgesem et al, 2015). This seems to suggest that we should read a link as an endorsement of the views expressed by its target source.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The discussion on climate change in parts of society is highly polarized, and this process is exacerbated by the involvement of powerful actors (Dunlap & McCright, 2011), characterized by conflicting framings of the problems (Hulme, 2009), and the contrarians' lack of trust in mainstream climate science is an important driver (Mann, 2012). Previous research has shown that the blogging on climate change is also highly polarized (Elgesem et al, 2015;Sharman, 2014).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The number of blogs discussing different aspects of climate change is high (Elgesem et al, 2015). Blogs are the main outlet for those who reject the consensus view on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), which receives relatively less attention in the mainstream media than the consensus view on climate change.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first group, we included, first, sources that actively reject the consensus view on climate change. There are two sources of this type among the 100 most-linked sources: 40. www.breitbart.com (1,416) 48. www.WattsUpWithThat.com (1,290) WattsUpWithThat.com is the most visible and well-known blog in the sceptical community (Elgesem et al, 2015;Sharman, 2014), while breitbart.com is a leading outlet at the extreme right, also with a clear sceptical agenda. We used these two highly visible sources to represent the sceptical discourse on climate change and to investigate the extent to which a link to these sceptical sources is a signal that the linking blog is a sceptic.…”

Section: Second Step: the 100 Most-linked Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Elgesem

2019

Nordicom Review

Self Cite

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This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.

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Frontiers in data analytics for adaptation research: Topic modeling

Lesnikowski

Belfer

Rodman

et al. 2019

WIREs Climate Change

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Rapid growth over the past two decades in digitized textual information represents untapped potential for methodological innovations in the adaptation governance literature that draw on machine learning approaches already being applied in other areas of computational social sciences. This Focus Article explores the potential for text mining techniques, specifically topic modeling, to leverage this data for large-scale analysis of the content of adaptation policy documents. We provide an overview of the assumptions and procedures that underlie the use of topic modeling, and discuss key areas in the adaptation governance literature where topic modeling could provide valuable insights. We demonstrate the diversity of potential applications for topic modeling with two examples that examine: (a) how adaptation is being talked about by political leaders in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and (b) how adaptation is being discussed by decision-makers and public administrators in Canadian municipalities using documents collected from 25 city council archives. This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation K E Y W O R D S climate change adaptation, governance, policy, quantitative text analysis, topic models 1 | INTRODUCTION Text-based research methods have been a cornerstone of qualitative social science methods since the 1950s (Lasswell, 1952). These approaches see documents as meaningful artifacts that can be analyzed for their thematic and semantic content (Krippendorff, 2013), and they form a core component of the climate change adaptation governance literature. In lieu of directly observable and measurable indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation governance research relies on written records, surveys, and interviews as its primary information sources about how different actors are responding to climate change impacts. Content analysis methods are commonly applied to sources such as government reports, strategic planning documents, peer reviewed and gray literature, and media stories (Araos et al.

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Structure and Content of the Discourse on Climate Change in the Blogosphere: The Big Picture

Cited by 29 publications

References 1 publication

Online misinformation about climate change

Online misinformation about climate change

The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Frontiers in data analytics for adaptation research: Topic modeling

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