Emotional framing in online environmental activism: Pairing a Twitter study with an offline experiment

Abstract

As the consequences of anthropogenic climate change become more apparent, social media has become a central tool for environmental activists to raise awareness and to mobilize society. In two studies, we examine how the emotional framing of messages posted by environmental activists influences engagement and behavioral intentions toward environmental action. In the first study, tweets (N = 510k) of 50 environmental activists posted between November 2015 and December 2020 are examined to measure their emotional content and its relation to tweet diffusion. Environment-related tweets are found to be shared more the less they contain positive emotion and the more they contain negative emotion. This result supports the negativity bias on social media. In Study 2 (N = 200), we experimentally test whether negatively vs. positively framed environmental content leads to increased reported intent to engage with collective action, and whether mood mediates that link. We find both direct and indirect effects on reported climate action intentions when mood is used as a mediator. The negative mood resulting from seeing negative tweets makes participants more likely to report higher action intention (indirect effect)—congruent with Study 1. However, seeing negative tweets also makes participants less inclined to act (direct effect), indicating a suppression effect and the presence of other factors at work on the pathway between information and action intent formation. This work highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of this relation and motivates more experimental work to identify other relevant factors, as well as how they relate to one another.

Twitter Mining for Detecting Interest Trends on Biodiversity: Messages from Seven Language Communities

“…Arlt et al (2018) investigated the effects of media and interpersonal communication on participation in climate discourse online and revealed that receiving information on climate change from social media, including Twitter; active information seeking online; and interpersonal conversations strongly encourage participation [28]. Sanford et al (2023) examined the influence of the emotional framing of messages posted by environmental activists on engagement and behavioral intentions on climate action [29]. Studies related to COVID-19 have included analyses of the impact of a global pandemic on mitigation behavior and information communication on climate change on Twitter [30][31][32].…”