Polarised Debates about Climate Protests in German News and Social Media

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

There is a communicative side to polarisation processes, then – this can be understood as discursive polarisation: the divergence of a sphere of consensus into multiple such spheres that represent a disrupted public sphere. This might also be asymmetrical, of course, and it might be the result of ideological as well as affective polarisation processes, and take place on content as well as interaction levels.

The present project applied this framework to a study of mainstream and fringe news media as well as Twitter data thematising climate protests by several groups. It assessed ideological polarisation in news content by examining the words most closely associated with Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation, respectively, and identified three major journalistic frames (crime and legal issues; global climate justice; and extremism and radicalisation). The use of such frames was largely consistent across the entire media landscape in Germany, and clearly distinct between the two protest groups. Anger and toxicity in reporting was also differently distributed across the reporting on the two groups.

Examining the most amplified tweets about the two groups also showed some significant differences, and substantial polarisation about the two groups within the retweet networks. There was substantially more support for Fridays for Future than for Letzte Generation, too, and a different distribution of supportive and opposing actors. Mention networks largely cut across those distinctions, though not necessarily in a constructive way.

A comparison between the news reporting and social media activity also shows strong connections, though not necessarily in on or the other direction: both appeared to influence each other. The analysis also points to different biases towards or against the two groups across the different newsrooms, which largely maps onto commonsense assumptions about the progressive or conservative attitudes assumed to be dominant in those newsrooms.