The climate of climate change: Impoliteness as a hallmark of homophily in YouTube comment threads on Greta Thunberg's environmental activism

Marta Andersson

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.003

Abstract

This paper investigates impoliteness and value homophily (‘thinking alike’) in the context of YouTube-based ideological discussions beneath the videos critical towards the Swedish environmental activist – Greta Thunberg. Drawing on the idea of rapport management, the study finds a remarkable scale of homophily as the postings follow recurrent patterns of face and sociality rights attacks echoing the same point of view. Consequently, while impoliteness has been recognized as widespread in social media for reasons such as anonymity and social detachment, this paper offers an insight into how the phenomenon contributes to the process of consolidation and homogenization of views through social comparison. As the study concludes, impoliteness in ideological discussions on YouTube may serve as the glue to ad hoc social contact between like-minded individuals –ultimately leading to social identification in relevant groups and formation of homophilous online communities.

Highlights

As of February 2021, YouTube is probably the biggest online video platform worldwide, attracting two billion monthly unique users globally
The aim of this paper was to analyze the substance of verbal attacks in ideologically charged intergroup discussions beneath the YouTube videos critical towards Greta Thunberg's environmental activism with a focus on: (1) the potential contribution of impoliteness to reinforcement and consolidation of alike views; (2) the scale of acceptance of the views expressed at the onset of a sample discussion thread
This paper has investigated impoliteness in the context of YouTube discussion threads concerning Greta Thunberg's environmental activism from the perspective of value homophily edefined as the psychological preponderance to seek validation of one's views through social comparison (Festinger, 1954)

Summary

Introduction

As of February 2021, YouTube is probably the biggest online video platform worldwide, attracting two billion monthly unique users globally (youtube.com/about). According to Johansson (2017), even though commenting is one of the technical affordances of YouTube, the common perception of the platform is that communication and/or interaction between people are secondary to other activities (e.g., media viewing) Perhaps for this reason, only 2.3% of the users decided to respond to the most viewed video (more than 22 million times at the time of that study) by the Swedish video gamer, PewDiePie (109 million subscribers as of February 2021). Andersson and its deindividuated context, where the participants remain anonymous and construct their identities only in terms of a relevant social category (i.e., a social or collective identity; Garces-Conejos Blitvich, 2010) This is quite different from the process of forming social bonds within a homogenous online community, whose members regularly interact and identify themselves (and others) based on the pre-established norms and community values (e.g., discussion forum, personal blog; Graham, 2015).

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion