Tracing the Changing Nuclear Energy Debate in the German Twittersphere

And the last speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is another local, Gregor Wiedemann, who is applying such Social Media Observatory approaches to the German debate about nuclear power. Nuclear energy slowly began to be phased out after the Fukushima disaster, but this has been challenged in recent times especially as a result of the energy crisis following the Russian attack on Ukraine, and some political actors are still calling for the (technologically impossible) reactivation of German nuclear power plants.

This is a useful case study of polarisation in public debate, and Gregor studied the dynamics of this polarised issue on Twitter, using argument mining methods to identify the arguments used and the frames and aspects they employed. This covers 2 million tweets between 2010 and 2022, as well as the 7 million tweets involved in conversations around the tweets which contained relevant keywords about nuclear energy. The top 1,000 most replied-to accounts were also categorised, and the project also examined the patterns of engagement (e.g. support / attack) within Twitter conversation threads.

This analysis shows an early substantial peak in activity around the time of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, but this is overshadowed by far by the vast increase in the volume of discussion since the start of 2021; in addition, while the anti-nuclear stance dominates early on, there is also a substantial increase in pro-nuclear tweets from 2018 or so onwards. This also implies the emergence of a significantly more polarised debate on Twitter. Interestingly, as pro-nuclear tweeting increases, the inequality of user participation also increases substantially – this points to the influx of a small number of very highly active pro-nuclear accounts.

Pro-nuclear tweets emerge first in the form of @replies; the use of retweets and quote tweets increases only somewhat later. Pro-nuclear tweets also appear especially strongly in the context of climate change, renewable energies, fossil fuel phaseouts, reliability, technological innovation, and related topics.

Pro- and anti-nuclear groups largely only retweet within their own communities, unsurprisingly. On both sides, there are prominent scientists pushing the respective pro- and anti-nuclear arguments; there are also civil society organisations, politicians, and media outlets involved in the discussion. Politicians affiliated with the fascist AfD party are found especially on the pro-nuclear side, while other parties are largely located in between the two sides (as far as the retweet network is concerned).

There still is no clear indication of why the discussion explodes so rapidly from 2020 or so onwards, though the lockdowns (and thus, additional time for social media discussions) in Germany might have something to do with it.