Youth climate activism in shrinking spaces: how Uganda’s activists navigate red lines

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> This research explores how controversial engineering decisions become the subject of widespread social media debates, using the prominent case of activism opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). The #NoDAPL Twitter hashtag became the primary vehicle for activism, with Twitter users shaping the debate through how they framed the controversy. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Framing refers to how information is packaged and presented. Because framing shapes the interpretation of information, it plays a crucial role in scientific controversies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. Which framing strategies are present in the most influential (determined by the number of retweets and “likes”) posts using #NoDAPL on Twitter? 2. How do the framing strategies used in the most influential #NoDAPL tweets change in relation to major political events? 3. Do the framing strategies used in the most influential #NoDAPL tweets amplify the echo-chamber effect and polarization on Twitter? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> The team collected daily data on the #NoDAPL hashtag and selected tweets with #NoDAPL that had more than 1500 likes or retweets, and categorized them by the frames that they exhibited. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and discussion:</b> The most-used frames were conflict/strategy and morality/ethics, with no noticeable middle path frame, leading to the echo-chamber effect and online polarization. The scientific/technical uncertainty frame was used only sporadically, in contrast with project proponents who tried to emphasize the pipeline's safety. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Implications:</b> Engineers seeking to understand and participate in public debates about issues central to their profession should recognize and engage the frames being used by the public to understand information. The project proponents’ defense of the pipeline fell on deaf ears, likely because they focused on safety rather than broader questions of morality. While engineers should share technical information related to a project under fire, they cannot ignore the concerns expressed by their critics.

Climate change is a critical global problem that requires immediate action to mitigate its effects. In recent years, youth climate activists have mobilized worldwide protests to demand action, using social media platforms to communicate and broadcast their message. This study examines Greta Thunberg's rise to global prominence through an analysis of her first year and a half of Instagram posts from June 2018 to January 2020, including visual and textual elements. First, we explore how climate change is communicated on social media by youth activists, and then examine these concepts through the unique case of Thunberg’s Instagram. Then, through qualitative content analysis, this study elucidates her communication strategy by applying the concept of framing to unpack how she frames climate change as a moral and ethical issue, uses an emotional appeal of hope, and visually frames motivational collective action to mobilize her audience. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings to explore the complexities of communicating climate change through social media and how Thunberg's activism on Instagram may provide an example for future generations.

Youth climate movements have increasingly adopted an intersectional approach to activism, highlighting how diverse social categories (inter alia, race, gender, social class, sexuality) intersect with power structures and systems of oppression. This article explores the educational value of practices of intersectionality as they unfold in activists’ everyday lives, both within the climate movement and in its relationship with other movements. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data from young climate activists belonging to the School Strike for Climate chapters in Portugal’s two largest cities (Porto and Lisbon), we account for both private and public activist events—such as activists’ meetings, school occupations, and protest actions—and the connections with other activist causes, including feminist, anti-fascist, pro-housing, and LGBTQI+ rights. We show that intersectionality in youth collective action translates into: (i) a political commitment to anchor the climate struggle in systemic injustices that affect minoritized groups and non-normative identities, and (ii) a pragmatic strategy to uphold the public relevance and reach of youth climate mobilization. Simultaneously, our data reveal how the intersectional framework in climate activism translates into informal educational experiences that are significant for political socialization and collective learning, challenging conventional pedagogical processes and hegemonic education systems. This article contributes to expanding traditional notions of education, emphasizing the importance of climate activism as localized political spheres that promote opportunities for participatory learning, aimed at co-constructing just, democratic, and inclusive futures.

Unhealthy food is one of the prevailing risk factors of NCDs and cancers, making the food industry a key player in their prevention. However, evidence-based public health policies aimed at reducing consumption of unhealthy food, may threaten industry sales. In response, food industry actors try to influence the development and implementation of these nutritional policies by engaging in corporate political activities (CPA). As part of the Joint Action PreventNCD, the CPA of relevant food industry actors in relation to public health nutritional policies will be assessed. In Belgium, strategies of Fevia, the umbrella organization of the food industry, are examined. This study analyses publicly available information collected from Fevia’s website, social media accounts (i.e. X and LinkedIn), newsletters and newspapers. A thematic qualitative analysis is conducted using established frameworks to categorize both framing and action strategies used by the industry. The categorization of framing strategies reveals how the food industry presents the actors, problems, and solutions. The framework of action strategies categorizes the CPA of the food industry under the following six strategies: information and messaging; financial incentives; constituency building; legal action; policy substitution; opposition fragmentation and destabilization. Preliminary results indicate that the industry often frames itself as ‘the good actor’ and primarily uses strategies such as ‘information and messaging’, ‘constituency building’ and ‘policy substitution’ to influence policies in Belgium in their favor. In the next phase, interviews with stakeholders (e.g. policymakers, politicians,...) will be performed to collect undocumented information. Overall, this research sheds light on the ongoing CPA of the food industry and will increase transparency in their influence on the development and implementation of effective nutritional policies aimed at reducing the burden of NCDs and cancers. Key messages • This study reveals how the umbrella organization of the food industry in Belgium influences public health nutritional policies through various corporate political action and framing strategies. • Identifying these CPA increases awareness of the industry’s influence, but also promotes their transparency and accountability, which is crucial for reliable and effective nutritional policy.

This research investigates youth participation in climate change politics and policymaking in South Africa, responding to a notable lack of Global South-facing studies in the literature on youth climate activism. Guided by our lead author’s substantial engagement in South Africa’s youth climate movement from 2014–2024 and drawing upon semi-structured interviews with 12 young climate activists, we offer rich insights into young South Africans’ motivations to participate in climate politics and policymaking. We then draw upon these insights to offer a series of provocations for climate change education. On investigating why youth participate, we find that although they report similar intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for participation to their Global North counterparts, South African youth climate activists place far greater emphasis on situated awareness and lived experience. We further improve the understanding of how young people perceive meaningful participation and climate (in)justices and how this shapes and is shaped by their activism. We therefore emphasise the value of incorporating both local case studies and affective elements in climate change pedagogies to encourage participation in collective climate action. Ultimately, we call for an enhanced recognition and inclusion of youth as active contributors to, and educators within, climate change governance and for the reconceptualization of youth climate activism, and policy engagement as key sites of transformative learning.

Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from social movements surrounding three issues in 2018-2019 (guns, immigration, and LGBTQ rights), we create a codebook, annotated dataset, and computational models to detect diagnostic (problem identification and attribution), prognostic (proposed solutions and tactics), and motivational (calls to action) framing strategies. We conduct an in-depth unsupervised linguistic analysis of each framing strategy, and uncover cross-movement similarities in associations between framing and linguistic features such as pronouns and deontic modal verbs. Finally, we compare framing strategies across issues and other social, cultural, and interactional contexts. For example, we show that diagnostic framing is more common in replies than original broadcast posts, and that social movement organizations focus much more on prognostic and motivational framing than journalists and ordinary citizens.

Information about human papillomavirus (HPV) disease and its vaccination has been increasingly communicated and discussed on social media platforms. The current study aims to investigate the coverage of HPV-related information on one of the most popular Chinese social media – Zhihu. Data for this study were user-generated articles, which were identified and collected by a Python web crawler with keyword searching. The final sample included a total of 115 articles, covering a two-year period between 2017 and 2018. Each article was coded for several key characteristics, including HPV epidemiological information, health belief model (HBM) constructs, framing strategy, and responses to the article. Results suggested that most of the articles reported HPV’s relationship to cervical cancer, HPV severity, and vaccination benefits. Thematic framing was more often used by the Zhihu articles to disseminate HPV-related issues, and a significant relationship between framing strategy and information coverage was found. The study has not only theoretically extended the literature of online HPV vaccine information coverage, but also practically suggested the needs to communicate comprehensive and detailed knowledge about HPV vaccination on Chinese social media.

ObjectivesThe effect of social media on COVID-19 vaccination behavior is sub-Saharan Africa is unclear. We conducted a study to determine social media use among a random nationally representative sample of adults in Uganda and assessed the association between recent social media use and COVID-19 vaccination uptake.MethodsWe used data from the 2020 general population survey in Uganda, the Population-based HIV Impact Assessment Survey, to identify a probability sample for a mobile phone survey and included nonphone owners in the phone survey by asking phone owners to pass the phone.ResultsIn March 2022, of the 1022 survey participants, 213 (20%) did not own a mobile phone, 842 (80%) owned a mobile phone, of whom 199 (24%) indicated social media use, and 643 (76%) of whom did not use social media. Among all participants, the most frequent source of COVID-19 vaccine information was radio. Overall, 62% reported receiving the COVID-19 vaccination. The multivariable logistic regression model found that social media use was not associated with vaccination status.ConclusionSocial media users in this population sample from Uganda—who were mainly young, urban residents with higher educational attainment—continue to utilize TV, radio and health care workers for public health messages, thus the Government of Uganda should continue to conduct public health communication through these mediums.

The most salient issue facing climate action today is how to communicate it. That is, "narrative" plays an overlooked, yet integral role in orienting our collective mindset to approach the climate crisis. The power that communication bears in spurring climate action is perhaps best exhibited by today's youth climate activists, who, I argue, have developed a new, distinct climate Grand Narrative. To investigate the themes of this narrative, I propose a novel conceptual framework, Youth Climate Metamodernism (YCM). In utilizing the metamodernist Grand Narrative as a theoretical framework, YCM overarchingly characterizes how youth climate activists communicate climate education and promote stakeholder action. I break this narrative framework down into three central themes: Youth Grassroots-ism, the Cult of Infographic-ism, and Transmovement-ism. These themes focus on how today's activists have discursively initiated a movement focused on future generations, disseminated in a verbally and visually accessible manner, and assembled by and for voices from diverse backgrounds. To understand the intricacies by which they employ YCM, I execute a literature review on environmental activism in Lebanon, and I perform a narrative analysis on the organization Fridays for Future Lebanon. I selected Lebanese youth climate activism as a case study to focus on an under-researched, yet dynamic demographic in the Middle East and North Africa. This article concludes that the Grand Narrative of today's youth climate activists serves as a set of blueprints for a proudly naive, yet justly ambitious, future sustainable world.

The March 2019 School Strikes 4 Climate, predominantly organized by young students, garnered widespread and polarizing media coverage. We aimed to identify how Australian mainstream print news media portrays youth involvement and dissent within climate action movements. A qualitative media framing analysis was conducted to determine how youth climate activists and dissent were presented during the first large-scale youth climate protests in Australia. Australian newspaper articles and opinion pieces (N = 101) were identified via ProQuest and screened. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted in NVivo12. Findings were assessed through a typology of dissent to determine how different forms of dissent were represented in the Australian print news media. The framing of dissent in Australian media coverage was varied, with news articles being more likely to prioritize the voices of young people, while opinion pieces resorted to fear-mongering rhetoric that critiqued and invalidated their agency. Protestors used combinations of dutiful and disruptive dissent to advocate for climate action, with the latter being more effective for challenging systemic drivers of climate change.

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical framework, grounded in managerial and organisational theories of dialogue, through which organisations can take decisions in relation to the most appropriate crisis response strategies for handling social media stakeholders.Design/methodology/approach– The theoretical framework is developed through a conceptual analysis of literature on dialogue, social media and crisis communication. The theoretical framework is then tested in eight different international organisations experiencing a crisis. For each case, different web contents, such as organisations' status updates/posts, links, videos published on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, were analysed using a rhetorical research approach.Findings– The analysed organisations apply different online dialogue strategies according to crisis types and in combination with specific crisis response strategies. Most of the organisations investigated carry on those dialogue strategies suitable to develop consensus (concertative), guide conversations on specific topics or issues (framing), find solutions to the crisis collectively (transformative). Concertative strategies were often associated with informative crisis response strategies, framing strategies with denial and justification crisis response strategies and transformative strategies with corrective actions.Research limitations/implications– By using a dialogic perspective in setting up online conversations with their external stakeholders, the paper proposes a theoretical model to explain companies' decisions in carrying on online dialogues during critical situations and thus contribute to the body of knowledge on online crisis communications.Practical implications– The proposed model can support crisis communicators to manage dialogue's aims and dimensions differently by taking into account both contextual and situational conditions.Originality/value– By integrating management studies on dialogue into crisis communication and social media literature, the authors intend to offer an alternative thinking of organisations' decision-making in relation to crisis response strategies and social media stakeholders.

Social media has become a key platform for various megaproject stakeholders to express opinions and shape public discourse. Yet, how these stakeholders engage in digital spaces remains underexplored. To address this gap, this study proposes a systematic framework to examine stakeholder engagement behaviors on social media, focusing on engagement intensity, posting influence, and framing strategies. For illustration purposes, the framework is applied to the analysis of Weibo posts about the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge in China. Results show that stakeholder engagement patterns varied across project phases: News media exhibited the highest engagement during construction, the general public became more active during the opening stage, and government organizations led engagement in the operation phase. News media accounts also produced the majority of influential posts, highlighting their critical role in shaping public discourse. Across all phases, attribute framing, news framing, and situation framing emerged as the most common strategies, emphasizing the project’s technical and symbolic significance. These findings not only deepen our understanding of stakeholder dynamics but also provide practical guidance for managing online stakeholder engagement behaviors across different stages of large-scale megaprojects.

This study investigates the media framing of climate movements in Australia and Germany. Media frames are powerful tools for shaping public perceptions of social issues. While previous research has focused on activists’ framing strategies, this study analyses how climate movements themselves are portrayed by news media outlets. Using a mixed-methods approach – combining qualitative and computational content analysis – it pioneers a dual-language methodology (English and German), advancing automated frame analysis. The comparative analysis considers media outlets’ political leanings, country contexts and climate movement diversity. Results show that right-leaning outlets frame climate movements more negatively, portraying them as threats to societal cohesion rather than solutions to a climate crisis. Furthermore, the Australian media landscape demonstrates less framing diversity compared to Germany. Findings are discussed in relation to their potential to shape public opinion, influence societal norms around protest legitimacy and contribute to polarisation in democratic societies.

Effective communication strategies are crucial in emerging online communication to ensure the information is delivered successfully on social media. To be a successful Instafamous, self-presentation and social engagement have become essential values that should be considered. Hence, this study aims to analyse the communication strategies to influence people on Instagram employed by Instafamous in Malaysia. This qualitative study focuses on the seven strategies of Framing Theory: Spin, Contrast, Tradition, Metaphor, Stories, Artifact, and Catchphrase. The contents analysis of the data revealed the communication strategies employed by the Instafamous. The findings show that the framing strategies help the Instafamous construct their posting and effectively deliver the information. The highest utilised strategy by the Instafamous is Spin, which is used to present a concept in such ways as to convey a value judgment, either positive or negative that might not be immediately apparent. The findings of this study contribute significantly to the enrichment of the communication literature. It also has positive implications for helping the Instafamous strengthen and improve their self-presentation and engagement on social media.

This study examines how local governments use social media during crises and how citizens respond to their communication. Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyse over 50,000 social media posts and 700,000 citizen reactions from 127 German local governments. Drawing on expectancy – disconfirmation theory and emotions as social information theory, we explore how different message framings – analytical vs. emotional – affect citizen responses: approval (likes), diffusion (retweets), and engagement (replies). Our findings show that analytical framing increases all three response types. Emotional framing, however, yields mixed effects: while positive emotions increase approval, they reduce diffusion and engagement. Negative emotions show the opposite pattern. These results reveal trade-offs in framing strategies and offer insights into how public administrations can communicate more effectively during crises. The study contributes to public administration and crisis communication research by linking specific communication strategies to distinct citizen behaviours.