Polarisation in Mainstream and Social Media Coverage of German Climate Protests

The post-lunch session on this first day of ECREA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in the case of disruptive climate protests. Such protests, in Germany for instance by the Letzte Generation protest group, tend to attract controversial media coverage, and it may be such coverage rather than the protests themselves that drive polarisation dynamics.

Untangling the various factors influencing such dynamics is difficult, and this project examined both news media coverage and social media debates to determine patterns of both issue and group polarisation, in both the content of communication and the interactions between communication actors.

For the study of journalistic content, it began by examining how differently the Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation movements were covered by news outlets. Crime and legality, extremism, and climate justice frames emerged prominently here, and these were differently distributed across mainstream and fringe media outlets in the case of the two protest movements. The distribution of angry and toxic language also differed notably in the media coverage of these movements (but less between different types of media outlets).

Social media debates about the protests also varied markedly. There is considerably more support for Fridays for Future than for Letzte Generation, and debates about Letzte Generation show a strongly polarised retweet network, with differing frames used by the two (supportive / antagonistic) poles of this network; this is also true for Fridays for Future, but with a greater amount of support for the latter group. In Twitter @mentions, engagement between supporters and antagonists is also often highly toxic.

The language patterns from such supportive or antagonistic tweets can also be found in the mainstream and fringe media coverage of the protests, showing a broad scale from supportive language in progressive media like Spiegel to reactionary media like Bild. This was also susceptible to new developments: language shifted strongly towards the antagonistic pole after a Berlin climate protest blocked an ambulance from providing first aid to a traffic accident.