Social Media and Online Public Deliberation: A Case Study of Climate Change Communication on Twitter

Abstract

This thesis studies the deliberative potential of social media, focusing on climate change communication on Twitter. In particular, this study seeks to explore the online deliberation seen in users' interactions and user-generated content from the perspectives of social network analysis and framing. Three research questions will be answered by three case studies focusing on climate change and an emerging technological topic related to climate change (negative emissions, intentional human efforts to remove CO2 emissions from the atmosphere): how did the climate strikes impact the deliberative potential of climate change discussions online, how did users collectively frame climate change via hashtags, and how did different user groups on Twitter collectively frame negative emissions via tweets? Together, these three questions allow the construction of a picture on the overarching research question: what is the potential of online discussions for deliberation? The data was collected using Twitter's application programming interfaces, covering, for the general topic of climate change, the period 10 September 2018 to 10 September 2019 and, for the subtopic of negative emissions, the period 10 June 2019 to 10 September 2019. There are three main findings of this thesis. First, it shows the changes of deliberative potential of climate change discussions before and after climate strikes and provides evidence that climate strikes increased the potential for deliberation by increasing reciprocity and diversity within the discussion of climate change. However, discussion of climate change after the climate strikes appears to have had less deliberative equality. Second, the thesis reveals that users collectively frame climate change by selecting and associating different hashtags in tweets. In particular, users utilise different hashtags to serve different framing purposes. For example, they use hashtags about consequences, causes and solutions of climate change to spread meaning throughout the entire hashtag occurrence network. Users also tend to connect less popular hashtags with more popular hashtags and make the latter even more popular, and tend to connect hashtags in the same category together in general. The thesis also characterises how climate change is framed on Twitter. In particular, it shows evidence that users tend to frame climate change as a problem that we can solve, and highlights the need for further action. Third, the thesis provides insights into negative emissions as an emerging technological topic, perhaps not as studied from a communication and social impact perspective as is warranted. The frames identified by structural topic modelling show various concerns of different user groups, such as governments, the media and business, and give us clues to the current situation of the communication and acceptance of negative emissions. As it focuses on the politics of climate change in the English language, the findings can not be generalised to all situations. However, it provides a research framework based on social network analysis and framing to examine the deliberative potential of online discussions and contribute to the understanding of climate change communication practice. This thesis provides a basis for future research that is expected to measure online deliberation more comprehensively and thoroughly, and improve our understanding of how social media is used by publics to communally work through the issues of climate change. Show more