#fridaysforfuture – What does Instagram tell us about a social movement?

Abstract

Understanding social movement structures is important for political decision-makers to enable them to recognise the various motivating factors behind these movements. The Fridays for Future movement characterises a political group that has a majority of young people, frequently using social media to organise actions. By conducting a social network analysis on hashtags, this study contributes to the understanding of the global Fridays for Future movement. Particularly, we focus on the use and connection of hashtags on Instagram. We collected 59,112 posts tagged with #fridaysforfuture and analysed 91,172 hashtags used therein. Subsequently, the 140 most used hashtags were divided into 11 clusters, which provide not only information about the organisation of the social movement via social media, but also insights into lifestyle-related aspects. The clusters include the topics: climate; nutrition, lifestyle and health; memes; cycling; art; sustainable consumption and the Earth Day. The article shows that the motives of the Fridays for Future movement are broad. We can demonstrate that Fridays for Future is connected to other social movements and gain insights into the everyday life of the Fridays for Future stakeholders.

Environmental Issues on Tiktok: Topics and Claims of Misleading Information

“…On Facebook, scholars focused on testing different approaches for evaluating the credibility of fake news (Lutzke et al, 2019), analyzing contents created by non-government organizations (NGOs) (Vu et al, 2020), and examining rhetoric on climate change denial on social media (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019). On Instagram, studies explored how climate change communication is implemented on the platform (Kober, 2022) or analyzed the content of the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (Herrmann et al, 2022). On Tiktok, research was conducted on the hashtag #climatechange (Basch et al, 2022), and semantic network analysis was used to investigate hashtags such as #climatechange, #ecofriendly, #sustainability, #ecotok, #forclimate, and #environmentalactivism (Nguyen, 2023).…”

Framing Climate Activism

“…Fridays For Future has relied largely on networked mobilisations through social media channels as documented by several research reports (Sorce, 2022) (Wahlström et al, 2019 (Herrmann, Rhein, & Dorsch, 2022). As a consequence, we have chosen to conduct a frame analysis of the content shared via Instagram pages of youthled climate action groups in India which sprung up as an outcome of the Fridays For Future movement in 2019.…”

“…Third, environmental citizenship also involves a social movement centred on environmental justice wherein young people propose demands, shape the collective future vision and further build the discourse in "intersectional" terms of how climate change disproportionately impacts people according to several socio-political factors such as race, gender, geographical location, ethnicity etc.Finally, the FFF strikes started in Europe and spread to other parts of the world primarily through mass media and social media channels. (Herrmann, Rhein, & Dorsch, 2022) (Boulianne, Lalancette, & Ilkiw, 2020) Within India, most young people learned about the strikes through social media.The climate strikes were spontaneous and lacked organising support from any of the pre-existing Social Movement Organisations in India. It was initiated and led by groups of young people coming together to adopt the method of skipping schools on Friday to demand robust climate action policies by the state.…”

The Use of Social Media for Food Activism in Turkey - The Case of Gidadedekti̇fi̇ (Food Detective)

“…Hâlbuki Instagram'ın güçlü görselliği, Twitter'ın aksine sınırlanmamış metin yazma olanağıyla da birleşince, aktivistlerin sadece metinle anlatamayacakları içerikleri aktarmasına da imkân veren güçlü bir araç sunmaktadır (Einwohner ve Rochford, 2019). Nitekim yakın zamanda Instagram'ın özellikle gençlik, siyahi ve kadın hareketleri tarafından etkin biçimde kullanıldığı Fridays For Future, Black Lives Matter, MeToo gibi örneklerin ortaya çıkması, Instagram'ın toplumsal hareketler ve aktivizm ile ilişkisine yönelik bir ilgi de yaratmıştır (Mundt vd., 2018;Einwohner ve Rochford, 2019;Herman vd., 2022).…”