Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Social media has changed the way the public consumes information. Regarding science information, a Pew Research Center survey (Funk, Gottfried & Mitchell, 2017) finds that about a quarter of American social media users consider them an important source. Social media are being studied in recent years as an important channel where people consume information about climate change (CC) (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014; Ilundain, 2016 or Painter, Kristiansen & Schäfer, 2018). A review on CC in social media (Pearce et al., 2018) has found that so far the research has strongly focused on Twitter and large-scale quantitative textual approaches. The authors argue that future work should include other platforms. Some of non common studies focused on Facebook approach the problem of CC fake news (Lutzke, et al., 2019); analyze the climate denial discourse (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019) or study the main frameworks through which the problem is approached (Vu, Blomberg, Seo, Liu, Shayesteh & Do 2020). This article adds a contribution on the communication about CC focusing on discursive strategies of some of the most relevant voices on CC in Facebook, the first social network in number of users (Digital, 2021). The study is based on 600 posts extracted applying a specific search algorithm the days before, during and after the Madrid Climate Summit (COOP 25, 2019). The findings suggest that the emotional component prevails in the discourse on CC on Facebook and seeks to call for action, but without delving into the causes or consequences of the problem.