IAMCR 2025
How Discursive Alliances Shift: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping
Axel Bruns, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan
- 16 July 2025 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2025 conference, Singapore
Presentation Slides
Abstract
Introduction
As global heating continues, public debates about climate change also shift. Faced with mounting evidence of more frequent and extreme weather events around the globe, narratives opposing climate action have moved from outright climate change denial to delay tactics. These storylines can variously shift the onus of action from developed to developing nations; question the economic impact of necessary action on national economies; and dismiss meaningful available approaches to climate change mitigation in favour of yet-to-be-developed breakthrough technologies (Lamb et al., 2020; Painter et al., 2023). Conversely, advocates for climate action are making increasingly forceful arguments for urgent practical interventions, which are beginning to resonate with populations experiencing increased climate stress from natural disasters and related impacts.
Such discursive strategies can be observed in many nations, yet Australia makes for an especially useful case study: it is particularly exposed to the consequences of climate change, has experienced increasingly severe disasters including cyclones, floods, and bushfires across its diverse climatic zones; and features a parliamentary political system which spans the full breadth from outright climate change denial (amongst elements of the conservative Liberal/National Coalition) through support for modest incremental initiatives (from Labor) to calls for urgent action (by the Greens). Following the particularly devastating bushfires during the 2019/20 summer, and the Coalition-led federal government’s lacklustre response at the time, the country has also seen the emergence of a new group of loosely networked independent political candidates, backed and funded by the Climate 200 initiative (Holmes à Court, 2023). Collectively known as the Teal independents because of their campaigning colour scheme that blends pro-business and environmental values, they have successfully challenged incumbent Coalition MPs perceived to be stalling climate action (Hendriks & Reid, 2024).
Data and Methods
This paper examines the evolution of Australian public debate on climate action over the course of nearly seven years, from January 2018 to August 2024 (and therefore including the major natural disasters in 2019/20 and subsequent years, as well as a change of government at the federal level in May 2022). We draw on data from Meta’s now-defunct CrowdTangle tool for data access to public discussions on Facebook, filtered specifically for public pages from Australia and for posts that contain one or more of a long list of climate change- and climate action-related keywords. We chose Facebook for this analysis because it remained the most popular social media platform in Australia during this timeframe (e.g. Park et al., 2022: 85), with a broader and more diverse userbase than Twitter (even before that platform’s takeover and decline under Elon Musk); our data gathering approach therefore captures post content and engagement data from official political pages (parties, politicians, candidates), news outlets, civil society groups, activists, local community pages, and a wide range of other actors. The total dataset contains some 4.8 million posts from these Australian pages.
We conduct a longitudinal analysis of this dataset using the novel practice mapping method (Bruns et al., 2024), which is proving especially useful in this context as CrowdTangle data about Facebook posting activities do not contain readily available interaction network information. Practice mapping instead constructs networks between individual actors (in our case, public pages on Facebook) by systematically comparing them for similarities in their posting practices: this includes general language choices, specific climate change claims, references to other actors and entities, embedded links, images, and videos, and other discursive features that can be extracted from the post content – which we define collectively as a Facebook page’s posting practices. Individual pages are then clustered into larger groups based on the strength of affinities between their posting practices, which in turn also enables us to determine the relative alignment or opposition between these larger clusters. A preliminary practice mapping network for our dataset, using only a limited set of content features, is shown in fig. 1, illustrating the detection of distinct discursive clusters.
Fig. 1: A map of distinct practices in the dataset, highlighting groups of pages engaging in climate action advocacy, climate change denial, and storm chasing. Other clusters tend to have a specifically local or regional focus (e.g. for the Northern Territory or Brisbane).
Practice mapping networks typically show several distinct clusters, representing closely aligned actors that can be understood as representing a particular discursive position; these clusters are in turn often grouped into a number of larger discursive alliances that each stand for a broader agenda (e.g. for or against immediate climate action), and which are engaged in an antagonistic and potentially polarised discursive struggle with each other.
For the purposes of this paper, we construct such a practice mapping network for the entire multi-year dataset in order to identify broad overall patterns of agonism and antagonism (Dehghan, 2020) in Australian climate debates, but also trace the positioning of individual actors (i.e. pages) and groups of actors in our dataset across this map over time – month by month and year by year. This enables us to chart the evolution of climate change discourses in Australia over time: for instance, actors engaged in outright climate change denialism at first might move towards climate action delay tactics as denial becomes untenable in the face of the evidence; actors calling for modest global action might move towards support for more urgent local initiatives.
In this analysis we pay particular attention also to the impact of major unforeseen developments (such as natural disasters) and regular events (the annual global COP climate summits as well as the federal elections in 2019 and 2022) on discursive practices. Additionally we also cross-reference these practices with the level of engagement from Facebook users that these pages and their posts receive: this enables us to examine whether audience preferences for specific stances towards climate change also evolve over time, and potentially even whether this evolution precedes or lags behind discursive changes at the page level.
Contribution
Using the innovative practice mapping approach as applied to a large-scale longitudinal dataset, this paper makes a unique contribution to the study of discursive shifts in public debate at a national level. Our work is able to document the diachronic contingency of discourses depending on endogenous or exogenous events; whether polarisation on climate action has deepened or lessened in Australia during this timeframe; and what arguments for or against urgent climate action appear to be connecting with the broader public. More generally, it also serves as a blueprint for similar longitudinal studies of public debates on other platforms, and across them.
References
Bruns, A., Kasianenko, K., Padinjaredath Suresh, V., Dehghan, E., & Vodden, L. (2024). Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks. arXiv: 2407.05956. http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05956
Dehghan, E. (2020). Networked Discursive Alliances: Antagonism, Agonism, and the Dynamics of Discursive Struggles in the Australian Twittersphere. PhD thesis. Queensland University of Technology. https://doi.org/10.5204/thesis.eprints.174604
Hendriks, C.M., & Reid, R. (2024). Citizen-Led Democratic Change: How Australia’s Community Independents Movement Is Reshaping Representative Democracy. Political Studies, 72(4), 1609–1631. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217231219393
Holmes à Court, S. (2023). The Big Teal. Monash University Publishing.
Lamb, W.F., Mattioli, G., Levi, S., Roberts, J.T., Capstick, S., Creutzig, F., Minx, J.C., Müller-Hansen, F., Culhane, T., & Steinberger, J.K. (2020). Discourses of Climate Delay. Global Sustainability, 3, e17. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13
Painter, J., Ettinger, J., Holmes, D., Loy, L., Pinto, J., Richardson, L., Thomas-Walters, L., Vowles, K., & Wetts, R. (2023). Climate Delay Discourses Present in Global Mainstream Television Coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 Report. Communications Earth & Environment, 4(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00760-2
Park, S., McGuinness, K., Fisher, C., Lee, J.Y., McCallum, K., & Nolan, D. (2022). Digital News Report: Australia 2022. News and Media Research Centre. https://apo.org.au/node/317946
