Abstract
There are concerns that climate change attention is waning as competing global threats intensify. To investigate this possibility, we analyzed all link shares and reshares on Meta’s Facebook platform (e.g., shares and reshares of news articles) in the United States from August 2019 to December 2020 (containing billions of aggregated and de-identified shares and reshares). We then identified all link shares and reshares on “climate change” and “global warming” from this repository to develop a social media salience index–the Climate SMSI score–and found an 80% decrease in climate change content sharing and resharing as COVID-19 spread during the spring of 2020. Climate change salience then briefly rebounded in the autumn of 2020 during a period of record-setting wildfires and droughts in the United States before returning to low content sharing and resharing levels. This fluctuating pattern suggests new climate communication strategies–focused on “systemic sustainability”–are necessary in an age of competing global crises.
Highlights
Climate change and COVID-19 represent two global crises unfolding on different time scales, and there are growing concerns that immediate threats such as COVID-19 are taking public interest away from the long-term challenges of climate change
Though the data in the entire repository is global, we focused on the United States given the large percentage of Facebook platform users in the country and the intensity of the pandemic in the region
The Climate SMSI is constructed as the ratio between all Facebook link shares and reshares containing “climate change” or “global warming” relatively to the total number of all Facebook link shares and reshares made in a certain region in a day
Summary
Climate change and COVID-19 represent two global crises unfolding on different time scales, and there are growing concerns that immediate threats such as COVID-19 are taking public interest away from the long-term challenges of climate change (i.e., the “distraction effect”; [1]). Mapping the social salience of climate change (i.e., the topic’s prominence in society) is germane across disciplines–from social influence research in economics and psychology [3, 4] to the exploration of social tipping points and synchronization in complex systems research and network science [5, 6]. Large-scale social salience insights contribute to important practical goals such as predicting and managing fluctuations in “moral indignation, political celebration, ideological fervor, happiness, and value judgments” Large-scale social salience insights contribute to important practical goals such as predicting and managing fluctuations in “moral indignation, political celebration, ideological fervor, happiness, and value judgments” (p. 1411; [7]).
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