Patterns in the Visuals Shared by Pro- and Anti-Climate Action Actors on Facebook

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Luca Rossi, whose interest is in visual communication strategies in climate change debates. Online debate on these topics tends to be highly polarised between those who do and do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change; it is also difficult to discuss in the abstract, so that visual representations become especially important in these debates.

How do specific images feed into the political narrative on climate change, then: are they used to debate objective facts (e.g. through data visualisations), or in a more polarising way to represent group identities? This project captured the posts, links, and visual content shared by hundreds of climate actors. It builds on concepts of polarisation that include both ideological polarisation (representing different views on specific issues – even in the absence of interactions) and affective polarisation (representing perceptions of one’s own and the other’s identities – often expressed through hostility between actors). Both of these can be operationalised in the analysis.

Some questions arising from this are whether visual images are shared across ideologically diverse groups; whether such groups produce divergent emotional reactions; and how this plays out especially in the context of climate protests. The project gathered Facebook posts with pictures from a broad set of public pages and groups, and other Facebook posts that shared the same images; further, it assessed the ideological leaning of these spaces based on word embeddings of their posts. It also assessed the emotional reactions (focussing on ‘love’ and ‘angry’ reactions); and assessed whether images contained physical protests.

As it turned out, only 1.7% of images were shared both by pro- and counter-climate actors – in other words, there was very little overlap in visuals. Content shared by pro-climate actors produced plenty of love – if it was shared by counter-climate actors, anger. The same holds in the opposite direction, too. This points to very different interpretations of the same content posting patterns.