“Are we doing enough?” A cross-national analysis of Tweets about climate change. The role of social movements, political ideology and environmental quality

Although climate change is one of the most relevant global threats, its perception largely varies across individuals and groups. Indeed, it is largely acknowledged that communication plays a pivotal role in shaping its meanings and perceived urgency. Several factors concur to explain such discrepancies, e.g., political identity, social norms (Wong-Parodi & Feygina, 2020), and geophysical influences (Gifford, 2006). Recently, the social movement “Fridays for Future” received great media attention, bringing the focus on climate change and related issues such as the role social media have in sharing and participation. The present contribution aims at exploring the relationship between beliefs about climate change shared online, and socio-psychological and structural factors that contribute to explain their variability across countries: political identity, level of activism, level of pollution of the Country. The study explored 21,159 English tweets, posted from February to October 2019, and containing hashtags like #climate, #climateaction, #extintionrebellion, and related ones. Descending Hierarchical Classification (Reinert, 1983) was performed to individuate the topics debated and their distribution among the considered factors. Main results showed that less polluted countries and those with people equally politically positioned among left-centre-right speak more about action; instead, more polluted ones are more focused on the issue itself.