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Shifting Climates: Climate Change Communication from YouTube to TikTok

Arianna Pera, Luca Maria Aiello

TL;DR

This study investigates how climate-change communication differs between YouTube and TikTok by analyzing 21 creators active on both platforms, using transcripts, descriptions, and comments. It applies NRC and LIWC language metrics alongside Sentence-BERT embeddings to quantify emotionality, sentiment, personal focus, and semantic alignment between videos and audience comments, as well as cross-platform shifts in narrative content. Key findings show TikTok narratives are more emotional, self-referential, and calls-to-action-driven, while YouTube content aligns more strongly with audience reactions; creators who diversify content across platforms tend to elicit reactions that better reflect their messaging. The work offers practical implications for tailoring climate campaigns to platform dynamics and demonstrates a robust cross-platform methodology for understanding online discourse on video-sharing platforms.

Abstract

Public discourse on critical issues such as climate change is progressively shifting to social media platforms that prioritize short-form video content. Content creators acting on those platforms play a pivotal role in shaping the discourse, yet the dynamics of communication and audience reactions across platforms remain underexplored. To improve our understanding of this transition, we studied the video content produced by 21 prominent YouTube creators who have expanded their influence to TikTok as information disseminators. Using dictionary-based tools and BERT-based embeddings, we analyzed the transcripts of nearly 7k climate-related videos across both platforms and the 574k comments they received. We found that, when publishing on TikTok, creators use a more emotionally resonant, self-referential, and action-oriented language compared to YouTube. We also observed a strong semantic alignment between videos and comments, with creators who excel at diversifying their TikTok content from YouTube typically receiving responses that more closely align with their produced content. This suggests that tailored communication strategies hold greater promise in directing public discussion toward desired topics, which bears implications for the design of effective climate communication campaigns.

Shifting Climates: Climate Change Communication from YouTube to TikTok

TL;DR

This study investigates how climate-change communication differs between YouTube and TikTok by analyzing 21 creators active on both platforms, using transcripts, descriptions, and comments. It applies NRC and LIWC language metrics alongside Sentence-BERT embeddings to quantify emotionality, sentiment, personal focus, and semantic alignment between videos and audience comments, as well as cross-platform shifts in narrative content. Key findings show TikTok narratives are more emotional, self-referential, and calls-to-action-driven, while YouTube content aligns more strongly with audience reactions; creators who diversify content across platforms tend to elicit reactions that better reflect their messaging. The work offers practical implications for tailoring climate campaigns to platform dynamics and demonstrates a robust cross-platform methodology for understanding online discourse on video-sharing platforms.

Abstract

Public discourse on critical issues such as climate change is progressively shifting to social media platforms that prioritize short-form video content. Content creators acting on those platforms play a pivotal role in shaping the discourse, yet the dynamics of communication and audience reactions across platforms remain underexplored. To improve our understanding of this transition, we studied the video content produced by 21 prominent YouTube creators who have expanded their influence to TikTok as information disseminators. Using dictionary-based tools and BERT-based embeddings, we analyzed the transcripts of nearly 7k climate-related videos across both platforms and the 574k comments they received. We found that, when publishing on TikTok, creators use a more emotionally resonant, self-referential, and action-oriented language compared to YouTube. We also observed a strong semantic alignment between videos and comments, with creators who excel at diversifying their TikTok content from YouTube typically receiving responses that more closely align with their produced content. This suggests that tailored communication strategies hold greater promise in directing public discussion toward desired topics, which bears implications for the design of effective climate communication campaigns.
Paper Structure (12 sections, 5 equations, 5 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 12 sections, 5 equations, 5 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methodology
  3. Data collection
  4. Metrics
  5. Popularity
  6. Language metrics
  7. Semantic alignment
  8. Results
  9. Types of climate change communication
  10. Semantic shift and comment alignment
  11. Discussion and conclusion
  12. Related work

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Alignment of comments to corresponding videos (RQ2.1) and overall content-reaction alignment related to platform stylistic shift (RQ2.2).
  • Figure 2: Popularity of creators on YT and TT.
  • Figure 3: Distributions of ratios between linguistic features found in the TT and YT videos of each creator, grouped by creator category.
  • Figure 4: UMAP representation of YT and TT content, with annotated topics.
  • Figure 5: Semantic conformity in terms of alignment of comments to their reference content (a) and alignment of TT audience to TT creators given the diversity of content from YT (b). Boxplots show distributions of the values along the two axes.