An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media

Abstract

This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of more than 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for more than a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.