Poles apart: Climate views on Twitter diverged dramatically during COP26

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-11-25 03:00

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A big jump in polarised climate change content occurred on Twitter during COP26 last year, finds an analysis of tweets related to COP meetings from 2014 to 2021. Polarisation appeared low and largely flat before this significant leap, which was driven by a four-fold rise in right-wing social media activity since the 2015 COP compared to pro-climate groups. The year 2019 stood out for rapid growth of climate scepticism on Twitter: the authors say political hypocrisy from “climate contrarians” and a climate backlash may be behind this, and recommend more monitoring of polarisation and its effects.

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conference: Nature Climate Change

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: City University of London, University College London (UK), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)

Funder: M.F., A.G., M.T., F.Z., W.Q. and A.B. acknowledge support from the IRIS Infodemic Coalition (UK government, grant no. SCH-00001-3391). F.Z. acknowledges financial support from the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship project EUMEPLAT grant no. 101004488. The authors declare no competing interests.

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