Does journalism reflect affectively polarized online networks?

A comparative analysis of the discourse on the climate protest movement "Last Generation" in (social) media

Stefan Müller

While science emphasizes the need for action in the face of the climate crisis, political efforts to curb climate change are progressing too slowly. As a result, numerous climate protest movements have been founded in recent years - from Fridays-for-Future to Ende Gelände and Extinction Rebellion. However, one of them stood out in recent German media coverage. In our research project, we focus on the discourse surrounding the climate protest group "The Last Generation", which began to successfully generate (media) attention with its disruptive form of protest, particularly in 2022. Protest actions by the "Last Generation" include sticking activists to the streets or throwing food or paint at the glass panes of famous works of art. The climate protest group also carries out other actions, such as boycotting fossil fuel infrastructure, to draw attention to their political demands. These actions often seem to be described as polarized or polarizing in public discourse.

Despite continuous public and media attention and a controversial public discourse, there have so far been few research projects that systematically approach the question of the extent to which the debate about the "last generation" is polarized. Our project attempts to address this question from a communication science perspective. To this end, the German-language Twitter discourse and media coverage of the "last generation" will be analysed comparatively in order to find out to what extent the structure and content of these discourses are (affectively) polarized.  Likewise, cross-media and cross-platform connections between the Twitter and news debates on the "Last Generation" will be identified. This project thus aims to address questions of social negotiation and deliberation: Is news coverage driven by supposedly polarized online debates? Do journalists succeed in setting their own thematic and content-related priorities? Do supposedly polarizing protest movements create a kind of "contagious", cross-platform media attention? And does this ultimately lead to a productive discourse on a necessary ecological transformation or merely to an emotionalized, content-free and identity-based debate in journalism and social media?

Data-driven research approach 
The project addresses the challenge of polarized discourse in German-language social media and news. To analyze this, we rely on an approach that combines network analysis with manual and automated content analysis. Our data-driven approach aims to examine the online discourse and understand who is having their say and which frames are being used (How is "The Last Generation" being talked about?). By combining social media and news discourse analysis, we choose an innovative and cross-media research approach that - at least to our knowledge - has not been done before on this set of questions. 

In a first step, we examine our generated Twitter data set, consisting of 1,444,428 tweets collected in the entire year 2022, using automated qualitative content analysis to identify the most important frames. In a next step, these will be used to build an algorithmic transformer-based classifier that will be able to automatically recognize frames for the "last generation". With the help of this classifier, we will then examine the extent to which frames are reflected on Twitter and in media coverage. 

This project is linked to a research project at The New Institute Hamburg, which deals with the polarization of sustainability and climate debates. In this way, we hope - as well as through information/workshop/outreach events with journalistic and (civil) society organizations - to make the generated findings visible to a broader public.

And here the group in their own words (German);