Environmental Discourse Exhibits Consistency and Variation across Spatial Scales on Twitter.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Computational Social Science
• Digital Communication

Background:

• Social media platforms are vital for information dissemination and group discourse.
• Previous research highlights social media's role in social movements (e.g., Arab Spring, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter).
• Environmental digital discourse on social media remains an under-researched area.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze and characterize environmental discourse on Twitter across different countries and user demographics.
• To identify variations in the prominence of environmental issues discussed on Twitter.
• To explore the relationship between political ideology and environmental issue salience on Twitter.

Main Methods:

• Automated text analysis of 200,000 Twitter users following leading environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
• Cross-national comparison of environmental discourse patterns.
• Case study of the coterminous United States, examining state and county-level variations.

Main Results:

• Decarbonization and species conservation were more intensely discussed than agriculture or marine conservation.
• Environmental discourse patterns on Twitter showed divergence and convergence across countries, states, and political ideologies.
• In the US, issue prominence varied by state and, in some counties, correlated with political ideology.

Conclusions:

• Automated text analysis provides a scalable method to characterize environmental priorities.
• Understanding variations in environmental discourse is crucial for targeted conservation and policy efforts.
• Twitter serves as a significant platform for understanding public engagement with diverse environmental issues.