Exploring the climate change discourse on Chinese social media and the role of social bots

Abstract

ABSTRACT While climate change discourse on Western platforms like Twitter often reveals signs of polarization and misinformation, discussions on Chinese social media remain less explored. Building on the theoretical framework of the green public sphere, this study aims to explore the features of the content (topics and veracity), the characteristics of engaged users (regular users and social bots), and the communication strategies adopted by engaged users in climate change discussions on Chinese social media. We employed machine learning methods to analyze 452,167 climate change-related posts generated by 311,214 users from 2010 to 2020 on Weibo, finding that climate change discourse concentrated on environmental and health impacts and action advocacy, and misinformation was not prevalent. Regarding the composition of engaged users, only a small proportion were social bots which concentrated on action advocacy and politics and governance, rather than skeptical and denialist discourses. In terms of communication strategies, we found that social bots on Weibo were more likely to forward a post or mention another user than regular users. This study expands our understanding of climate change discourse and the green public sphere on social media and provides insights into leveraging social bots in climate change communication in an AI-powered society.