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Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine Countries

Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, Arttu Malkamäki, Ali Faqeeh, Esa Palosaari, Anniina Kotkaniemi, Laura Funke, Cáit Gleeson, James Goodman, Antti Gronow, Marlene Kammerer, Myanna Lahsen, Alexandre Marques, Petr Ocelik, Shivangi Seth, Mark Stoddart, Martin Svozil, Pradip Swarnakar, Matthew Trull, Paul Wagner, Yixi Yang, Mikko Kivelä, Tuomas Ylä-Anttila

TL;DR

The paper investigates how climate policy elites interact on Twitter across nine national policy systems, using a disaggregated actor framework that includes four organizational levels per actor. It builds a comprehensive roster (≈941 actors) and harvests 2017–2022 Twitter activity (≈47.7 million statuses; ~2 million climate-related), analyzing direct retweet networks and indirect joint-retweet patterns. The findings reveal strong internal connectivity within countries, limited cross-country direct engagement, and cross-national alignment through shared content from international organizations, activists, and researchers, with events like Fridays for Future and COP26 driving climate activity. The work highlights the polycentric, transnational diffusion of climate discourse on Twitter and foregrounds the role of non-official actors and bridging content in shaping climate governance discourse online.

Abstract

We identified the Twitter accounts of 941 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 48 million activities from 17,700 accounts at different organizational levels. There is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.

Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine Countries

TL;DR

The paper investigates how climate policy elites interact on Twitter across nine national policy systems, using a disaggregated actor framework that includes four organizational levels per actor. It builds a comprehensive roster (≈941 actors) and harvests 2017–2022 Twitter activity (≈47.7 million statuses; ~2 million climate-related), analyzing direct retweet networks and indirect joint-retweet patterns. The findings reveal strong internal connectivity within countries, limited cross-country direct engagement, and cross-national alignment through shared content from international organizations, activists, and researchers, with events like Fridays for Future and COP26 driving climate activity. The work highlights the polycentric, transnational diffusion of climate discourse on Twitter and foregrounds the role of non-official actors and bridging content in shaping climate governance discourse online.

Abstract

We identified the Twitter accounts of 941 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 48 million activities from 17,700 accounts at different organizational levels. There is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 16 sections, 6 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Results
  3. System Size and Activity Levels
  4. Interactions within and across countries
  5. Direct Engagement
  6. Indirect Engagement
  7. Future Work
  8. Methods and Data
  9. Identifying Climate Policy Elites in National Policy Systems
  10. Identifying Policy Organizations and Members on Twitter
  11. Organization Primary
  12. Individual Executive
  13. Organization Auxiliary
  14. Individual Non-executive
  15. Data Collection and Preprocessing
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: Overview of our data. Panel A) Numbers of accounts and activity by country and organization level. Panel B) Monthly ratio of climate activity to total activity. The first green bar marks the Fridays for Future strikes in September 2019, and the second green bar marks COP26 in November 2021. The red bar covers January--March 2020, which is the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Figure 2: Climate change retweet networks, 2017--2022. Nodes are placed using the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm and edges are not plotted for visual clarity. Only the largest weakly connected component is shown.
  • Figure 3: Mixing matrices for direct (retweets) and indirect (joint retweeting) connections. Cells are the mean logged ($e$) counts of connections (with min-max scaling) between all pairs of accounts with the given country-level combinations. Darker cells indicate higher connectedness. Axes labels refer to 1) organization primary, 2) individual executive, 3) organization auxiliary, and 4) individual non-executive accounts.
  • Figure 4: Top ten bridging accounts by year. The bridging statistic is the sum of the logged ($e$) cross-country joint retweet counts across all retweeted tweets from the account in the given year.
  • Figure 5: Data collection protocol. Gray tasks are fully manual and blue tasks are computer-assisted.
  • ...and 1 more figures