Two chambers, no silver bullets: the growing polarity of climate change discourse

This chapter analyzes the growing polarity and echo chambers on the example of climate change-related discussion on social media, particularly on Twitter. Echo chambers or filter bubbles are growing phenomena in the infosphere and have a disastrous effect on topics prone to misinformation and disinformation. Online discourse has become increasingly agonistic and polarized. The current discourse about climate change is particularly worth studying, given its high popularity in the mainstream media, and well-proven polarization featuring science-oriented narrative versus diverse forms of science denialism and anti-scientific attitudes. The chapter presents an analysis of nearly 400,000 tweets about climate change in English that represent two ideologically opposing camps: climate change deniers, represented by keyword climatehoax, and climate change believers, represented by sustainability. The analysis shows that tweets from climate change believers are on average more positive than those by deniers. Both groups also differed in terms of the selection of media links most shared in tweets. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of the most popular tweets and most frequent words from opposing groups revealed pronounced differences in how believers and deniers frame their contrasting discourse. Overall, the chapter observes a significant degree of polarization of climate change-related discourse on Twitter.