I am chairing the final session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town today, which is a partner association session on (de)polarisation featuring members of the German DGPuK, and we start with Rico Neumann. His interest is in the role of opinion leaders as potential agents of (de)polarisation of debates on climate change. Climate change debates tend to be highly controversial and depolarised in Germany and elsewhere, of course, and are also conducted across social media platforms and messaging apps; this enables both collective and connective action logics.
Climate discourse is highly emotional, polarised, and polarising, featuring considerable levels of fear, blame, and anger, but also significant positive emotions which seek to sustain engagement. To what extent can civil society actors serve as communicative opinion leaders in this context; what discursive power do they have to shape debates, introduce topics, amplify debates, and shift attention towards relevant topics?
The German climate landscape features a vast range of such actors, including recent structureless or leaderless movements which nonetheless still feature some iconic political opinion leaders like Greta Thunberg. These may be able to construct affective publics around their activities and interests, applying universal emotions (anger, contempt, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise) which transcend language and cultural barriers; contempt is a particularly strong sign of polarised discourse in this.
The project draws on data from Telegram to map the organisational networks of key actors and issues; it also applies dictionary-based sentiment analysis to the posts by such actors. This is focussing on three cases: the less contentious Environmental Action Germany organisation; the neutral Fridays for Future movements; and the more radical Last Generation climate protest movement.
Mapping linked actors here shows that Environmental Action Germany serves as a political gatekeeper, also linking to EU and national political actors; Fridays for Future and Last Generation produce considerably less interlinked networks. Hashtag co-occurrences point to a range of key discourses: energy security and waste recycling, both of which are connected to fairly negative sentiment, and overfishing, which due to policy successes here is more positive. Negative emotions dominate, especially anger, but love is also present. These are unevenly distributed across the different groups.
Networking occurs primarily across issues rather than actors; few linkages show an organisational fragmentation and strategic division of labour between these three groups; there might also be an emotional division of labour between them, due to their differing positioning. Depolarisation here would depend on their capacity to bridge these fragmented affective publics, translate affective climates across issues and time, and maintain communicative linkages across organisational and group divides.
