Twitter enables an online public sphere for social movement actors, news organizations, and others to frame climate change and the climate movement. In this paper, we analyze five million English tweets posted from 2018 to 2021 demonstrating how peaks in Twitter activity relate to key events and how the framing of the climate strike discourse has evolved over the past three years. We also collected over 30,000 news articles from major news sources in English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom) to demonstrate how climate movement actors and media differ in their framing of this issue, attention to policy solutions, attribution of blame, and efforts to mobilize citizens to act on this issue. News outlets tend to report on global politicians’ (in)action toward climate policy, the consequences of climate change, and industry's response to the climate crisis. Differently, climate movement actors on Twitter advocate for political actions and policy changes as well as addressing the social justice issues surrounding climate change. We also revealed that conversations around the climate movement on Twitter are highly politicized, with a substantial number of tweets targeting politicians, partisans, and country actors. These findings contribute to our understanding of how people use social media to frame political issues and collective action, in comparison to the traditional mainstream news outlets.

Climate change is a critical global problem that requires immediate action to mitigate its effects. In recent years, youth climate activists have mobilized worldwide protests to demand action, using social media platforms to communicate and broadcast their message. This study examines Greta Thunberg's rise to global prominence through an analysis of her first year and a half of Instagram posts from June 2018 to January 2020, including visual and textual elements. First, we explore how climate change is communicated on social media by youth activists, and then examine these concepts through the unique case of Thunberg’s Instagram. Then, through qualitative content analysis, this study elucidates her communication strategy by applying the concept of framing to unpack how she frames climate change as a moral and ethical issue, uses an emotional appeal of hope, and visually frames motivational collective action to mobilize her audience. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings to explore the complexities of communicating climate change through social media and how Thunberg's activism on Instagram may provide an example for future generations.

Infographics of modest complexity are commonly used to convey knowledge to non-experts. However, little is known regarding how the use of infographics may convince the public and lead to massive behavioral changes in response to an acute cause. In March 2020, scientists and journalists revamped a scholarly published graph into the “flatten the curve” (FTC) mantra that defined the United States’ initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined how Americans’ awareness of the flatten the curve charts relates to their perceived effectiveness of social distancing measures, perceived controllability of the pandemic, and behavioral intentions toward social distancing measures. Implications on visual communication of science are discussed.

Background and Aims Before COVID‐19 was declared a global pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and many other organizations published many images of its pathogen (namely SARS‐CoV‐2) to raise public awareness of the disease. Despite their scientific and aesthetic values, such images may convey metaphoric meanings and cause a subsequent impact on viewers' fear and disgust. This study investigated how exposure to the SARS‐CoV‐2 images might shape viewers' fear, disgust, and risk perception of COVID‐19. Methods Seventy images depicting the SARS‐CoV‐2 were collected from the websites of CDC, NIAID, and third‐party organizations in early 2020. We first showed the images to a group of 492 adults recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and asked them to rate their levels of fear and disgust for each image. Results of this pre‐test allowed us to identify images that evoked high, medium, and low levels of fear and disgust, which were then used as treatment stimuli for an online experiment with a national sample of 500 U.S. adults. Results Exposure to the selected SARS‐CoV‐2 images caused different levels of disgust, but not fear, among the members of the national sample. Noticeably, the images evoking the highest level of disgust backfired among those who were least concerned about COVID and caused less fear than images evoking the lowest level of disgust. Image exposure was not associated with risk perception of the disease. Conclusion This study found that the seemingly objective visualizations of the SARS‐CoV‐2 are not emotionally neutral. Scientists, agencies, and media professionals should be mindful of the potential emotional impact of science visualizations, such as when creating the iconic image for COVID‐19 or other infectious diseases.