New Article Out: The Instagram #Climate Change Community

Recently, Dr. Ann Dale, researcher Brigitte Petersen and I conducted a study in which we looked at the hashtag community formed by people who post using the tag #ClimateChange on Instagram. We wanted to see whether this community showed evidence of the potential for community agency, that is to say, do the posts related to this hashtag seem like content that could, under the right circumstances, inspire community action around the issue of global warming?

“Social change not climate change” by Global Justice Now is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We scraped all the posts using the hashtag for a month in 2016 using the Social Media Lab‘s Netlytic, and then we analyzed both the comments on the posts, and also the connections between the people who posted. We found that while the #climatechange community did seem to possess some of the criteria that would enable community agency on an issue, importantly absent were bridging ties between people from communities with diverse points of view.

What does this mean? Well, it was difficult to find any connections between those people who believed that climate change was a problem, and those who believed that climate change was not a problem. Also, within individual communities, there were a few major celebrity voices (like Leonardo DiCaprio, or National Geographic) who tended to dominate the conversation. This means that celebrity voices still have more power than others, even on the relatively “level playing field” of participatory social media.

There is hope though, for example, if the dominant celebrity voices were able to act as more of a bridge between climate change communities and their discontents, then perhaps it would be easier to influence opinion at a wide scale. Additionally, the #climatechange community on Instagram possesses other characteristics that may make it more likely to mobilize in response to an event or issue. For example, the communities that do form, while they lack diversity, are very supportive of one another.

More work still needs to be done, but what we’ve learned from this work is while social media can certainly be part of the climate change solution, it cannot be the whole solution on its own. Instead, it likely works best as one tactic within a broader strategy of information sharing, public relations, and community mobilization.

If you’re interested, you can access the full article at the Journal of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. Volume 12, issue 3.

New Article Out: The Instagram #Climate Change Community

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *