2024/12/20 by Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, Chen, Ted Hsuan Yun, Arttu Malkamäki +46 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Media Studies and Communication #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.15545
openalex publication_date 2024/12/20 · arxiv published 2024/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · arxiv updated 2026/06/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Social media is an important space for interactions between climate policy actors, with a burgeoning literature recognizing them as critical platforms of political contestation. We identified Twitter accounts associated with 904 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 40 million activities from 16,086 accounts at different organizational levels. We studied these actors and their interactions as a polycentric governance system, emphasizing how boundary blurring between the public and private on social media platforms uniquely shapes the online policy process. Initial results show there is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.