Social Media for Future: The Use of Collective Emotions in Online Social Movement Campaigns

Abstract

Social media is a powerful tool to spread news and influence others. In fact, 71% of Americans use the Twitter platform to get their news (Shearer and Matsa, 2018). This study uses the context of Greta Thunberg and the global FridaysForFuture climate strike movement to understand which types of communication are most likely to be engaged with by users. Through this paper, we aim to contribute to the social movements literature by introducing sentiment and collective emotions. We find that longer tweets containing images and video content tend to be more liked and retweeted. We also found that negative tweets tend to be more effective. In terms of collective emotions, tweets evoking disgust and sadness are the most effective. Contrasting prior studies, positive emotions, anger, and fear are not significantly effective in gaining awareness online.