Hot weather, hot topic. Polarization and sceptical framing in the climate debate on Twitter

ABSTRACT

Extreme weather events like the heat wave of 2018 reinforce public attention for climate change. Social media platforms facilitate, define and amplify debate about this topic. They give rise to counterpublic spaces through which counterpublics such as climate sceptics get a stage they would not easily get in mainstream media. Previous research suggests that sceptics use these spaces as safe havens, but also as bases for interventions in the hegemonic debate. Applying a multideterminant frame model, we analyse the Twitter debate among climate change ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. We study all tweets in which the heat wave was related to climate change and which were shared by Dutch and Flemish users between 28 July 2018 and 4 August 2018. Laying bare the worldviews underlying the frames of sceptics and non-sceptics, we first demonstrate the diversity of – unilaterally interacting – ideological interests. Building upon this analysis of the scope of the debate and analysing its form, we show that both groups mostly use similar antagonistic strategies to delegitimize and denaturalize their out-groups. We argue that these interventions promote polarization rather than a constructive agonistic debate. As such, this study refutes previous studies that consider sceptic frames as deconstructive and non-sceptic frames as constructive.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• polarization
• online deliberation
• climate change
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As of 30 September 2018, the services and website of Sifter, powered by Twitter-owned social data provider Gnip, have been decommissioned.

2 All examples are translated from Dutch. Original phrasing of the tweets can be found in Appendix B.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renée Moernaut

Renée Moernaut is a postdoctoral member of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the University of Gloucestershire Ecolinguistics Circle. Her main research interests include multimodal framing, environmental and climate change communication and journalism practice (especially the mainstream-alternative divide).

Jelle Mast

Jelle Mast is Assistant Professor of journalism studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. He is Director of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies and currently serves as the Chair of the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association (ICA). His research is typically located at the intersection of visual communication, journalism practice and professional ethics.

Martina Temmerman

Martina Temmerman is Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She is a member of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies at VUB. Besides, she is the programme director of the Masters in Journalism at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies (Applied Linguistics), where she teaches linguistic discourse analysis and journalistic writing classes. Her research focuses on the linguistic analysis of journalistic communication.

Marcel Broersma

Marcel Broersma is Professor and Director of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on the current and historical transformation of journalism, and how journalists, politicians and citizens use social media in particular. He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, chapters, monographs, edited volumes and special journal issues on social media, transformations in journalism, journalism history and political communication.