Abstract
This paper is about the networks around the fires in the Brazilian Amazon forest during 2019 in tweets with the English hashtags #PrayForAmazonas, #ActForTheAmazon and #AmazonFire. We have studied 2517 tweets. Both the languages and the content of the tweets were taken into consideration to see who is assembled and what discursive elements are used in the framing. Our results indicate that the fires are framed as a global concern, beyond the Brazilian borders, especially as ‘the lungs of the world’. The framing of responsibility for the fires is focused on president Bolsonaro, who is assembled in many tweets, while animals and indigenous people are framed as victims. We conclude that the tweets in English tend to produce more relationships in terms of likes and retweets, in comparison to tweets in Portuguese and Spanish. In addition, the role of politicians and celebrities seems critical in getting traction around a hashtag and making it trending.
Highlights
The transnational character of environmental issues has been raised for decades (Dryzek 2013; Tsing 2005), and humans are even affecting the global climate (Malm and Hornborg 2014)
The research questions are both qualitative and quantitative: – What participation and interaction can be measured in tweets with the hashtags about the fires in Amazonia? – What central frames can be identified in the networks regarding responsibility for the fires and what actions to take? – How are English hashtags materializing activism in multi-language speaking context, and what are the consequences of these networks?
In this study we have explored how different languages are used in tweets with English hashtags concerning the fires in the Brazilian Amazon in 2019, since English has been said to be inherent to Twitter as lingua franca
Summary
The transnational character of environmental issues has been raised for decades (Dryzek 2013; Tsing 2005), and humans are even affecting the global climate (Malm and Hornborg 2014). President Macron metaphorically included the Amazon in his ‘house’, (and he paraphrased Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg who stated that ‘our house is on fire’ some months before at Earth Day) His statement emphasizes the globally networked character of climate and environmental politics enabled by social media. The exposure on the web of what may seem a national event (the fires) makes it possible for different ideological positions to transcend the event itself and challenge the sovereignty of a nation state, in this case Brazil, over the control of its territory This national-international perspective on politics and activism partly overlaps with the interest in different uses of languages, and especially with the use of English as lingua franca (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). We seek to uncover how English hashtags are reappropriated by different linguistic communities to spread their message on social media
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