Department of Informatics and Media
Master’s Programme in Social Sciences, Digital Media and Society specialization
Two-year Master’s Thesis
Protest Movements and the Climate Emergency Declarations of 2019: A New Social Media Logic to
Connect and Participate in Politics
Student: Joseph Doolen Supervisor: Helga Sadowski
Autumn 2020 Word count: 21 855
Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationship between contemporary climate protest movements (Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future) and governmental bodies in European countries that declared a climate emergency in 2019. The primary contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate how emerging communication practices by these movements compare to the perceived influence of such practices among political decisionmakers in their governing bodies’ votes for a climate emergency declaration. Twitter content (tweets by movement accounts) surrounding protest actions of the climate movements was coded using concepts deduced from theoretical literature of participation, media and communication. Themes induced from this data were also used for coding. A thematic analysis of empirical interview text from semi-structured interviews of nine politicians in eight governmental bodies (six German city councils, that of Innsbruck, Austria and the Swiss cantonal parliament of Vaud) on this subject matter was done similarly. Relational thematic analyses of both datasets influenced the coding of one another. A frame analysis grounded in these data studied the use of social media imagery and text by the two movements. Another look at the interview data reflects the influence these movements had on climate emergency declarations via comparison of politicians’ stated impressions of the movements’ participation/influences with formations of tweeted movement frames. The data support the hypothesis that citizens engage via the connective power of personalized participatory culture on social media, enabling political participation. Today, we see a shift away from a political logic of social movements abiding to strong shared identity and meaning through frames of collective action. Instead, a social media logic, which aims to achieve the same functions, operates in loosely networked movements based on individualized frames of youth identity. This ‘connective identity’ bridges the participatory culture of social media with offline political participation in the streets and halls of power.
KEYWORDS: Social media logic, participatory culture, connective action, Twitter, climate
change, political participation, collective action, identity, protest movements.
Contents
List of figures and tables ...5
1. Introduction ...7
1.1 Setting the scene...7
1.2.Aim and research questions ...9
2. Background and Context...10
2.1 Problem: Climate communication failing at end of the decade...11
2.2 Problems: Tweeting change, meeting movements’ demands and a job for a child?.16 3. Theoretical Framework ...23
3.1.Participatory culture ...24
3.2 Connective action...25
3.3 Collective action frames of climate emergency and protest...28
3.4 Social media effects...30
3.5 (Social) media logic and (social) mediatization...32
3.6 Actor-Network Theory, Networked Society and Twitter ...34
3.7 Identity in text and image: Youth, activism and credibility...39
3.8 Political participation and the ladders of participation: A political participatory culture?...40
4.Methods and Methodology...44
4.1.Thematic and frame analysis justification ...44
4.2.Politician interview thematic analysis ...45
4.3.Twitter thematic analysis ...50
4.4 Collective action frame analysis...54
4.5 PAF Analysis ...55
4.6 Validity and limitations...55
4.7 Ethics...57
5. Results and Analysis...58
5.1. RQ 1: Which themes and types of frames are tweeted most frequently by FFF and XR and what are the differences between the two movements in that usage frequency?...58
5.2 RQ 2: How are these frames, themes and concepts being used on Twitter in image, hashtag and text? ...67
5.3 RQ 3: How do politicians from governmental bodies that passed climate emergency declarations use these same or similar frames, themes and concepts in discussions of the climate movements and emergency declarations? ...74
6. Conclusions and further research...91
6.1 Limitations to this study and future directions...93
6.2 Final toughts...94
7.References...97
8. Appendices
Appendix A. Semi-structured politician interview outline...104
List of figures and tables
Figure 1. Climate Action Tracker...12 Figure 2. FFF demands...13 Figure 3. XR Demands...14 Figure 4. . Greta Thunberg’s tweet of her first day striking in front of the Swedish
Parliament...18 Figure 5. Replies to the first tweet of Greta Thunberg’s first climate protest... 20 Figure 6. FFF Germany’s tweet of the schedule of the first major nationwide FFF event...22 Figure 7. FFF Konstanz tweet reporting the first climate emergency declaration in Germany is
embedded on Welt website and the news is posted to Welt Instagram account...36Figure 8. Scheme of online vs. offline ladders of participation connected via literature terms in the context of climate protest movements and climate emergency declarations...41 Figure 9. Timeline of key events and data collection points in this thesis project...44 Figure 10. Code co-occurrence map of pilot study...52 Figure 11. Image snip of ‘Image Tweets Document’ used for thematic analysis and image frame analysis in this project. 423 tweets with images were included...53 Figure12 XR Berlin tweet illustrating the importance of technology deployment to protest
logistics, coded ‘connective action’ (logistics) and ‘empowerment’...69
Figure13. XR Berlin protest tweet coded ‘PAF’, engagement, credibility and #RebelVoices...70 Figure 14. Tweet by Klimastreik Schweiz during the International Rebellion protests with a
‘political/election proximity’ code for the text... ...71 Figure 15... XR Kiel tweet, XR Berlin tweet...73 Figure 16. Youth imagery and ‘personal action formations’ represented in tweets by FFF
Cologne and Klimastreik Schweiz...76
Figure 17. XR Berlin tweets of videos from Berlin Blockieren...77
Figure 18. Tweets from FFF Europe (left) and Greta Thunberg (right) from the SMILE for Future conference and protest in Lausanne, Switzerland...80 Figure 19. Klimastreik Schweiz tweet from Feb. 2, 2019 depicting the nationwide strikes that the Swiss member of parliament cites for motivating Canton Vaud’s early climate declaration...81 Figure 20 . Greta Thunberg tweet on June 21, 2019...84 Figure 21 Tweets from XR Berlin and XR Cologne at Berlin Blockieren...87 Figure 22. Feb 21, 2020 tweet by Greta Thunberg (left) and Sept. 20 tweet by FFF Konstanz....90
Table 1. Information on major climate protests investigated for associated Twitter content and politician interview qualitative analysis...38 Table 2. Interviewee demographics, media use, date of governmental climate emergency
declaration and general interview information. ...47-48
Table 3. Key thematic codes and their subcodes tallied from qualitative interviews of politicians
in governments that passed a climate emergency declaration in 2019 ...49
Table 4. Thematic coding results of 423 tweets divided into groupings of Twitter accounts for
comparison...59-60
Table 5. ‘Core framing task’ categorization of collective action frame hashtags in tweets...64
Table 6. Image identity frame/PAF analysis coding results of 423 tweets divided into groupings of
Twitter accounts for comparison...66
1. Introduction
1.1 Setting the scene
Media use for most citizens is not so different from that of most politicians. Politicians are members of the same society. They are susceptible to the same forces acting upon the citizenry.
The only thing separating them is their identity, which aside from being a politician may include being a scientist or a parent of a young child. In a time where media are becoming more prominent in every aspect of life, politicians are not thinking, acting or legislating in the same way as before.
Under a political logic, “the needs of the political system... take center stage and shape how political communication is played out, covered and understood” (Strömbäck, 2008:234). While this world still exists, a shift toward a more media-centric politics is accelerating.
Also accelerating is the rate of climate change, or at least the perception by some of the most credible experts that this is the case. With a young generation of ‘digital natives’ growing up in a media-saturated environment of doom and gloom about the future of their environment, they are taking it seriously. While it is difficult to prove that youths today are more serious about tackling the issue than previous generations, their skillset and communication practices can be shown to be vastly different. For example, surveys show American young adults aged 18-24 use Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat each at significantly higher rates than that of any other adult age group (Pew Research, 2018). Also, at least half of surveyed U.S. teens get news from social media, with the source more often being a celebrity or ‘influencer’ than a news organization (Carufel, 2019).
Some of the largest climate protests in history have taken place since late 2018, and until the COVID-19 pandemic, it did not seem as if they would stop. The two most prominent climate protest groups in this time have been Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Fridays For Future (FFF).
Britain-based XR’s demands and large protests, with simultaneously entertaining and disruptive
tactics, have achieved some effect, at least great media attention (BBC, 2019a). The children of
FFF have garnered attention for their consistent protests every week in many locations, often
occurring weekly in some cities (Jaresand, 2018). FFF groups often hold unassuming smaller
protests where children make a statement simply by skipping school on a Friday and showing up to protest for what they believe to be the public interest.
While getting people to ‘act’ online is ostensibly easier than bringing them out into the street to force their government to make a change, charges of ‘slacktivism’, ‘performance activism’ or ‘feel-good activism’ have made a bad name for participation in politics online, ultimately doing ‘little or nothing to empower or democratize structures’ (Knoll et al, 2020: 137).
However, this view fails to consider two things. First, the global problem of climate change is so vast and difficult to grasp, let alone to make a solution for it or mobilize action in any meaningful way. Second, participation is not only about power, it is about taking part in a social process (Carpentier, 2016). This can be how people shop, move, eat or interact with each other. Most people in the European Union, or in northern and western Europe, do many of these everyday tasks with the help of social media. This is a shared meaning in the culture. Indeed, it is social media that ‘have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction’ (Van Dijk & Poell, 2013:2).
Making one’s own protest group in the city is easy with social media and its affordances such as
interaction with and guidance from a movement and other protesters. The popularity of social
media platforms, smartphone technology and the online availability of the idea elements of the
identity and methods of FFF and XR make barriers to participation very low. This thesis argues
that this is a better way of tackling climate change, making it easier to participate in a social,
everyday way in ubiquitous media that loosely connect members but can activate networks quickly
and inspire emotionally and personally. Previous research finds that Twitter, despite the high
accessibility to many sectors of society in western democracies, maintains the privilege of the
wealthy and powerful in political discussion on the platform (Dagoula, 2017). The same work
recommends a reinvigoration of the public sphere that is not happening on social media. This
accessibility and openness of Twitter as an online public sphere fails to avoid dominating power
structures and can be better reflected in the themes discussed, it is argued. This thesis argues that
XR and FFF are achieving this, in a way. They are doing it not only with salient themes but also
frames that take aspects of reality and make them salient in communication to promote a problem
definition (climate emergency), causal interpretation (government inaction), moral evaluation (the
sake of the future) and treatment recommendation (urgently act to reduce emissions) (adapted from
Entman, 1993:52). These networks of activists, concerned youth, credible experts and even former
‘slacktivists’ are connected in a new way. They are enabled by technology, engaged with others’
identities individually and empowered to act because of this. This thesis argues that the identity of youth in this context can itself encapsulate motivating frames of action in an accessible way.
1.2 Aims and research questions
This thesis seeks an understanding of participation in climate change politics both online and offline. This first aim is to explain the relationship of participation in these two domains in the climate movements’ attempt to achieve political goals. Twitter and the protests covered by Twitter represent two spheres to be researched. Politician interviews provide data to understand meaning within these spheres. This thesis, in part, investigates the effects that XR and FFF are having in using Twitter as a public sphere that is more accessible and egalitarian to a wider swath of society by effectively increasing political participation among previously disengaged citizens (in this case, youth especially). This research project does not point to a causal relationship between the climate movements (FFF and XR) and the climate emergency declarations, but merely seeks to map the mechanisms of the modern mediatized environment within the social phenomena of these movements and the declarations from both sides. The two sides in this case are climate movements’
social media accounts, which provide visual and text data, and politician interviews, which provide text and in-depth context to the themes and frames presented by both sides.
This thesis also aims to address identity as a key role in driving the climate movements online and offline. One of the most prominent features of a protest movement is the identity of the protester, and this remains true on social media. In the case of FFF, that identity is made even more prominent as the original point of the movement was for children to miss school to protest. This is a unique opportunity to investigate the perceived effects of such protester identity and compare it to that of the ‘eco-activist’ that is more commonly associated with environment-related protests.
Comparative analysis of FFF and XR will be informative here.
Additionally, this thesis aims to categorize the framing of climate emergency and protest.
This will be best accomplished by deconstructing media frames in the context of personalized and
action-oriented messages in social media text and imagery into their idea elements which include themes and concepts of participation. This can be a significant contribution to communication and media studies in a social movement context. Different characterizations of XR and FFF can be informative to divergent political actor perception of these movements.
The overarching problems of this project are (1) the explanation of methods that climate protest movements use on social media to work toward their political goals and (2) explaining views of the movements held by the decisionmakers they are trying to influence. In the search to solve these problems, this thesis hypothesizes that citizens engage via the connective power of a personalized participatory culture on social media, enabling political participation. Another way to explain this hypothesis would be that these movements use the ‘connective action’ of
‘participatory culture’ in social media, empowering citizens offline in the push for climate emergency declarations and climate protest.
Research Question 1: Which frames, themes and concepts are used by FFF and XR most frequently on Twitter and what are the differences between the two movements in that usage frequency?
Research Question 2: How are these frames, themes and concepts being used on Twitter in imagery, hashtag and text?
Research Question 3: How do politicians from governmental bodies that passed climate emergency declarations use these same or similar frames, themes or concepts in discussions of the climate movements and emergency declarations?
2. Background and Context
This section will briefly tell the story of the climate movements to be studied, the problems
they are addressing, how they and they seek to do so. This is contextualized in a discussion of
climate emergency declarations and the data that this thesis will collect to study these phenomena.
2.1 Problem: Climate communication failing at end of the decade
The topic of anthropogenic climate change has gained salience in the current media
landscape via news items concerning bizarre weather and climate disasters. The relevance of
climate change to modern social science lies in the response of societies’ institutions designed to
respond to such catastrophe. As an international problem, a comprehensive response to climate
change must also be international. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) released a special report in October 2018 warning against continued rates of carbon
emissions, outlining the effects of resultant increases in global temperature of 1.5 and 2 degrees
Celsius (IPCC, 2018). This concerted effort was a message by the international scientific
community relayed to concerned publics increasingly aware of national governments’ inaction and
the complexity of any solution (Figure 1).
Fig. 1. Climate Action Tracker (CAT) of 32 countries comprising approximately 80 percent of global emissions, tracking ‘progress towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming well below 2°C’ (CAT, 2019).
Problems in the communication of climate science can result from a lack of clarity, understanding and urgency, as caused by complex language (scientific or bureaucratic) and deliberate obfuscation by corporate and political actors. Messaging by XR and FFF, particularly via social media content, has broken through these problems to influence political change in several forms, from public action and awareness to potentially influencing governmental declarations of climate change (German: Klimanotstand) in Europe in 2019.
The climate change protest movements XR and FFF began in 2018 amidst this rising awareness and sense of urgency. Within the modern mediatized political landscape (everything is affected by the media), these movements sought to address the problems of unresponsive government and abstract climate science via a public sphere bridging online and offline worlds.
Social media is treated as part of a public sphere in this thesis mainly because, working with offline
participation, it fits the Habermasian criteria of high accessibility and relatively unrestricted ability
to confer (Habermas, 1989; Lindgren, 2017). Citizens are using their own identities and imagery to communicate old protest tactics in a new way, though Twitter itself and political communication on the platform are dominated by prominent figures in the media and politics (Larsson & Moe, 2011). In this respect, FFF has a prominent figure to carry their message in Greta Thunberg. This does not discount the decentralized grassroots structure of FFF and XR and the broad offline participation seen in the streets, though.
Political goals of the two movements are most succinctly laid out in their demands (Figures 2 and 3). The overall push for governments to declare a climate emergency has yielded declarations by governmental bodies representing more than 820 million people worldwide, and though the first such declaration occurred in Darebin, Australia on December 5, 2016, almost all others happened in 2019 and 2020, including the European Parliament on November 28, 2019 (CEDAMIA, 2020). Oxford Dictionaries even named ‘climate emergency’ its Word of the Year in 2019 (Schuessler, 2019).
Fig. 2. FFF demands in 2019 (2 drafts) (Fridays For Future, 2019).
Fig. 3. XR demands (Extinction Rebellion, n.d. on left; Collateral materials from XR Sverige (Sweden) protest, 2019, top right and the ‘International Rebellion’, bottom right)
Mediated communication and occupation of public spaces are key characteristics of
modern protest movements, which are appropriating corporate social networking sites like Twitter
for political ends and the public interest (Gerbaudo, 2012:2; Galis & Neumayer, 2016;
Papacharissi, 2015). Social media’s rise to popularity and ubiquity inspired hope that political opinion would be more audience-accessible and political mobilization more easily enabled (Gustafsson, 2014), even though a decade ago the rise of the internet did yet not show an increase in participation (Effing, van Hillergersberg and Huibers, 2011:25). Importantly, Gupta, Ripberger
& Wehde (2018) find that advocacy organizations ‘use Twitter to disseminate messages that contain the basic elements of policy narratives’ (p. 119).
The London protests by XR over 10 days in April 2019 were the first such protests of such a scale, highly visible globally and directly influencing the British Parliament to declare a climate emergency days later (BBC, 2019a). This declaration is legally nonbinding as of June 2020, as many of the climate emergency declarations appear to be, but the House of Commons passed the motion without a vote, distinguishing it from the other declarations discussed in this thesis.
Tweets during and around the time of major protests organized by FFF and XR are analyzed in this study (only German, Swiss and Austrian events and social media content are included in the analysis). The Global Week for Future in September 2019 and the International Rebellion in October 2019 are highly influential in the data in my social media analysis here because their size and visibility were of great impact and the volume of tweets during this time was high. The coordination of the groups’ offline actions and communication of their culture and events have undoubtedly been primarily communicated via social media content of protesters and reporters present at protests. Sympathizers within social media networks spread these cultural and participatory messages further, ultimately saturating mass media in the case of both XR and FFF.
The networking capabilities and uses of Twitter justify it being the social medium analyzed in this
thesis. Interviews of politicians in bodies that have passed a climate emergency declaration are
used to show a correlation in their thinking to themes, concepts and frames presented by FFF and
XR on Twitter. These interviews influenced the decision to analyze tweets from periods of protest,
primarily because politician interviewees tend to agree that they were most influenced by
witnessing the young members of climate movements and their actions both in-person and through
media networks (of which Twitter is a part). These platforms of omnidirectional communication
typify the nature of Henry Jenkins’s ‘participatory culture’ wherein people are no longer just
receivers of media communication (Jenkins, 2006, from Gerbaudo, 2012:22).
2.2 Problems: Tweeting change, meeting movements’ demands and a job for... a child?
The microblogging website and social media application Twitter went online in 2006. In its early years, political topics on Twitter were relatively rare, especially compared to that of entertainment (Fuchs, 2014: 190-191). While the ‘Twittersphere is governed by celebrities’, the nature of celebrity is changing (Lindgren, 2017:184). This is best illustrated in the context of climate change by the rise of the profile of the teenage climate protester and founder of the FFF movement, Greta Thunberg, in 2018. As of August 2020, Thunberg has 4.1 million Twitter followers. The attention garnered by this movement (also known as Skolstrejk för Klimatet in Sweden, Youth Strike for Climate in Britain and Klimastreik in Switzerland) has elevated Thunberg to such heights as Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year and nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and 2020 (Brown, 2020). Images of Thunberg regularly go viral, be they of her protesting alone in front of the Swedish Parliament on Fridays, of her speaking in front of crowds of thousands, testifying at the U.S. Congress or those of her scolding world leaders at the United Nations. Such images may not convey the scope of the climate crisis or the meaning of the science behind it, but the message is the same: Solutions must be urgently implemented and change must happen now to avoid an ever-deepening global catastrophe. But because such messages of science and policy from political leaders, such as those from the U.N. IPCC, have failed to yield effective global or pan-European change, the most prominent contemporary protest movements (FFF and XR) have taken to the streets with the help of social media to spread their messages.
Can a social media logic come to the rescue? An understanding of the elements of social media logic, such as programming your own social media channels, controlling the content you see, tailoring your image and ‘staying on brand’ to maximize popularity and measure it in responsive feedback on the platforms. So important is staying connected to your followers, friends, public figures and an entire network of actors to be managed via strategies such as networked individualism, even learning to monitor and manage all of this in a more ‘professional’ or analytic way through datafication (van Dijk & Poell, 2013:5-11). Professionals can be hired to do this;
most modern organizations do so. The understanding of this social media logic can give an
organizational advantage over competitors, even a personal competitor. This is how platforms like
Twitter remain vulnerable to unequal, undemocratic power structures. Using this knowledge in the
public interest may be less common, at least for adults who may be blind to the implications of managing goal-oriented social media text and imagery, especially when the issue at hand is personal image framing online, as anyone with a parent on Facebook may testify. However, in doing so for the public interest, the social media literacy of youths growing up with these platforms can make Twitter, as this thesis argues, part of the modern public sphere. This is a new social media logic, perhaps a ‘social media logic for future’.
XR was founded by Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook, experienced activists who have agendas laid out and who birthed their movement out of their Rising Up! organization and Action Network, where people can register their events with XR and find advice on how to adhere to the movement’s goals and ideology (The Guardian, 2020). The Twitter content of these two leaders in times of protest did not meet the analysis criteria outlined in the methods of this project. In the case of FFF, it can be argued, the connection between politics and citizen actors came first with Greta Thunberg, portrayed on Twitter as a singular actor with goals of affecting the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election (Figure 4). This shows that both movements arose from something else, and I aim to show similarities and differences in their methods and tactics online and offline in order to better understand how they have similarly arrived at the nexus of political influence and social media.
There is no official membership of XR or FFF. Anyone can, within reason, carry out an
innovative protest action alone or with others in the streets, carrying out Carpentier’s (2016)
definition of political participation as equal and democratized. This is the decentralized power
structure of the movements themselves, loosely connected with smartphones, platforms and the
communication suited for this environment (text, imagery, simultaneity). Not just protesting, in
skipping school the schoolchildren of FFF are undertaking another form of civil resistance called
noncooperation (Svensson, 2019). This potent imagery in the street reiterates a simple message
tweeted out by Greta Thunberg the morning of August 20, 2018 on her first day of School Strike
for the Climate, which would grow into the Fridays For Future movement: ‘We children usually
do not do as you say, we do as you do. And because you adults are taking a shit on my future, so
am I. I school-strike for the climate until election day” ( Figure 4).
Fig. 4. Greta Thunberg’s tweet of her first day striking in front of the Swedish Parliament (Thunberg, 2018a).
Here, Thunberg is taking aim at (1) influencing the people’s choice of government in the
election nineteen days later; it can be argued that she also aims to (2) influence the policies of the
current and future members of the parliament. Both of these efforts comprise the other definition
of political participation (Xie & Jaeger, 2008) relevant in this thesis. The use of youthful identity
in protesting the country’s highest political body with an interesting message and image is an example of Twitter being a top platform to engage with both politicians and the public.
Did FFF begin on Twitter? No evidence could be found of the FFF movement on social media earlier than this tweet by Thunberg or any other FFF social media account. Because of this and the fact that XR officially launched in October 2018, this tweet and protest appear to be the beginning of the largest climate movements of the digital age.
Thunberg began these protests before the September 9, 2018 Swedish parliamentary election because this had been the hottest summer in Sweden’s history, causing a bad drought and widespread wildfires, even above the Arctic Circle (Crouch, 2018). These climate events and others in 2018 and 2019 justify this thesis’s politician interview questions about how such reports, weather and disasters have fueled the climate emergency declarations (Appendix 1). Though Thunberg’s original protest was meant to be every day until the election, which it was, she decided to make it every Friday, starting September 8, 2018. (Carrington, 2018).
Also significant for this study, for this first Friday that would help begin the FFF
movement, Thunberg had been invited via Twitter comment from the organization Klimat Sverige
to attend the People’s Climate March on Friday, September 8, 2018 (Figure 5). This is an example
of the activation of a preexisting loose online network with a frame of personal action, this frame
being represented in both the text and image of the August 20, 2018 tweet. Such a personal action
frame (PAF) (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) bridges the gap from engagement (discussion between
an individual and an organization) to empowerment (collaboration and online tasks) to offline
empowerment (offline collaboration and responsibilities) (Effing et al, 2011). Thunberg spoke at
the event in September (Klimat Sverige, 2018). This thesis, in part, concerns itself with where
these types of issue-framing devices (PAFs) take place on Twitter and if PAFs are truly present
in text, image or both.
Fig. 5. Replies to the first tweet of Greta Thunberg’s first climate protest (Thunberg, 2018a). The organization Klimat Sverige replies ‘Hey Greta, do you want to help us spread the climate march Sept. 8’?
This thesis relies upon Effing et al.’s (2011) ‘participation ladder’ of online participation, an adaptation of MacIntosh and Whyte’s (2004) stages of e-participation which involves three main stages: e-Enabling, e-Engagement and e-Empowerment (referred to in this thesis simply as (enabling, engagement and empowerment). Enabling, in this sense, involves giving people access to information (organizational knowledge/ability, science knowledge, technological capability).
Engagement involves discussion and interaction between people and organizations (movements, government). Finally, empowering involves people working together with organizations, meaning giving people responsibilities, tasks, or other opportunities to collaborate with organizations (Effing et al., 2011:29).
The FFF movement would soon become very popular in Germany, with the first
widespread protest taking place on Friday, December 14, 2018. In preparation, FFF Germany
tweeted ‘(t)oday is ready, in less than 7 hours the first #ClimateStrike begins. Together today we
want to show a first sign in (#Germany) against the current (#Climate politics) and (#Climate
change). Our demand for a livable (#Future) is clear’ (Figure 6). The image tweeted shows a
schedule of times and locations of the coordinated protest across the nation. The text is coded in
this thesis project as giving a ‘collective action frame’ because it expresses shared meaning, values
and ideology (Benford & Snow, 2000). This logistical information is distributed via the technology
affordances of the Twitter platform. This thesis investigates how such characteristics of Bennett
and Segerberg’s (2012) ‘connective action’ on social media enable publics to participate, the first
rung on Effing et al.’s (2011) ‘ladder of participation’. Even more, this thesis asks how
movements’ use of connective action (Section 3.2) is used to achieve the collective action (Section
3.3) and its goals. In this process, the research presented seeks to investigate ‘synergies... sparked
between new and old media and communication practices’ (Tufte, 2017:4).
Fig. 6. FFF Germany’s tweet of the schedule of the first major nationwide FFF event.
Notably, XR’s first of their famed three demands is to ‘Tell the truth: Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions’(Extinction Rebellion, n.d.). Describing the relationship between this strategy of demands and the emergency declarations by government is the first step in describing climate movements’ efforts to use participation to effect policy change via increasing political participation. Via participation on of social media, in a participatory culture as this thesis argues, these movements are finding success.
Such participation is borne out of opposition to powerful institutions; in the modern media
landscape this ‘participatory culture’ “is about people finding voice, agency, and collective
intelligence within the corporate-maintained structures of Web 2.0 platforms” (Jenkins, Ito &
boyd., 2015:184). Participation is important in order to match ambition to achieve an effective climate agreement (Tørstad 2020:761-762).
To achieve broad participation in international agreements, political pressure from the electorate must be applied to representative government on national, regional and local levels.
Compliance cannot match the deep ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement if governance does not acknowledge:
1) the certainty that anthropogenic climate change is real, and 2) the urgent need to respond with public policy.
In short, the contribution of this thesis lies in showing how citizen participation operates on social media and offline in the streets, with common goals of influencing governments to work toward broad participation in the Paris Climate Agreement. In this thesis, the use of the term ‘participation’ will be in reference to that of citizens and their participation in the climate protest movements that emerged in 2018 with XR and FFF. Offline and online environments are distinguished from each other and shown to be highly interrelated in modern society. Qualitative interview data as well as social media content are used to show this relationship.
3. Theoretical Framework
Climate emergency declarations by European local and regional governments provide a case study of the relationship between online and offline participation as illustrated by text and imagery tweeted by climate movement accounts and feedback from public policymakers in those governments. This section will describe the main theories, logic and terms necessary to understand the analysis of data, discussion and conclusions made in this thesis. This will include not only topics of media and communication, but also participation, activism and identity.
Key to this study is a discussion of the roles of Henry Jenkins’s ‘participatory culture’, W.
Lance Bennett and Andrea Segerberg’s ‘logic of connective action’, Benford & Snow’s (2000)
characterizations of collective action frames, Carpentier’s (2016) treatment of participation and
van Dijk & Poell’s ‘social media logic.’ Also in this section, broader discussions of media logic, mediatization, frame analysis, actor networks and the Twitter platform provide key frameworks in the understanding of the thesis. Finding a bridge between offline and online participation is key to the theory in the research presented. The end of this section helps to outline a framework supporting the connective action of an online participatory culture as being this bridge
3.1 Participatory culture
This opportunity for study is, more specifically, one of the relationship of ‘participatory culture’ and 'political participation’ in both online and offline environments.
Participatory culture is defined by the following characteristics (Jenkins et al., 2007;
Jenkins, 2009:5-6; Jenkins, Ito & boyd, 2016:4) :
1. Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, 2. Strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,
3. Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,
4. Members who believe that their contributions matter, and
5. members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created).
In this study, participatory culture will be used to characterize tweet and interview texts for the
characteristics listed above. This participatory culture on social media does not refer to the
affordances of technologies like smartphones and social media platforms that are designed to
enable users to make choices about a participatory experience. This relates to Bennett and
Segerberg’s (2012) ‘connective action’
3.2 Connective action
Bennett and Segerberg (2012) characterize connective action with three key elements:
1. Loose organizational linkages, 2. Technology deployments, and 3. Personal action frames (PAFs).
The resultant ‘strength of weak ties’ in social networks can be utilized through the ubiquitous technologies of smartphones and social media (p.757). Loose organizational linkages online prove to be stronger than they appear when technology (smartphones, social media, logistical information on protest) is deployed throughout movement networks (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013)).
In this study, connective action will be used to characterize tweet and interview texts for the three key elements listed above.
The process of the discourses delivered by XR and FFF on Twitter and in the streets and parliaments of the cities examined here is a process of strategy. This strategy is purportedly to achieve their stated list(s) of demands, but something else is happening here. Something must happen before these demands can be met. These movements have a goal of social learning in their media audience via observation of behaviors, which is intrinsically linked to knowledge and communication (Lie & Servaes, 2015). The first audience of FFF and XR are those who witness them on social media and in the streets. The science knowledge of climate change already exists in these places; important here are the knowledge and communication of spectacular and personal frames featuring emotion and identity. This thesis investigates the idea that these frames of identity lower barriers to participation and are leading to mobilization of networked publics, of which politicians are a part.
Along with collective action, novel methods are being used by XR, and FFF online. This
thesis focuses on connective action as a key difference-maker in their successes of mobilization
and political participation offline. Connective action involves ‘actors stepping back from
projecting strong agendas, political brands, and collective identities in favor of using resources to
deploy social technologies enabling loose public networks to form around personalized action themes’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012:757).
Social media can make the private sphere ‘a sphere of connection and not isolation, as it serves primarily to connect the personal to the political, and the self to the polity and society’
(Papacharissi, 2010:164 from Fuchs, 2014:186). As Twitter can support processes of social movements that produce ‘affective’ or emotional statements ‘in a manner that simulates the way that we politically react in our everyday lives’, behavior on social media can represent analogs to offline political behavior (Papacharissi, 2015:27). This thesis examines not only text, but also imagery on Twitter as these kinds of social media statements appealing to a connecting emotion.
It is such connection that can make the bonds of loosely connected networks formed on social media into strong, resilient movements. Connective action is mobilizing action among already-available digital social networks providing a simplified and faster communication and formulation of ideas (Bennet and Segerberg, 2013). This nonhuman agency provided by digital networks adds resiliency and may bridge the gap between participatory culture and political participation. This human-nonhuman actor network engages publics in amore democratized fashion (than traditional mass media) via the defining characteristics of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009:5-6).
Segerberg and Bennett (2011) show that hashtags, images, quotations and other features
during protests act as amplifiers of an ongoing “protest ecology”, crosscutting network
mechanisms and serving as non-actor gatekeeping functions. Twitter allows publics to find
indexed and algorithm-directed events and topics, aiding climate movements’ efforts in building
an online pool of potential protesters out of a loosely connected network of followers already
enabled with knowledge of climate change and the movement. Viewing social media as an
organizational communication method rather than just an avenue of knowledge distribution is key
to understanding the power of contemporary protest movements. Equalization of power in political
participation is exhibited by XR and FF members in that, as Bennett and Segerberg (2012)
describe, ‘more informal organizational actors that develop some capacities of conventional
organizations in terms of resource mobilization and coalition building without imposing strong
brands and collective identities’ (p. 757).
Rather than just viewing it as an agent of a movement, Twitter can also be a window into how movements work, showing ‘the protest ecology’s wider composition, and in particular something of the organizational scheme in which they are embedded’ (Segerberg & Bennett, 2011:201-202). Social movement imagery on Twitter is powerful tool to communicate individualized frames of identity. In the case of XR and FFF, the two most important identity frames are that of ‘youth’ and ‘eco-activist’. Part of an activist identity involves protest, which includes tactics that attract media attention. Such tactics include carrying signs, gathering in large groups, and noncooperation with norms (e.g., going to school) or laws (thus attracting police). In analysing images of FFF and XR protest, this project seeks to peer through this ‘window’ on social media.
PAFs are ways that connective action organizes networks, not because they enable the audience with knowledge and scientific information dispersal, but because they ‘require little in the way of persuasion, reason, or reframing to bridge differences in others’ feelings about a common problem’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013:37). This idea is similar to Castells’s (2007) mass self-communication of personal ideas caused by interactive, horizontal communication networks where ‘insurgent politics and social movements are able to intervene more decisively’ (pp. 238- 239). Papacharissi (2015) states “(b)ecause personalized action frames do not require reframing for attunement with a greater collective, they attain virality easily, as they are shared through informal conversational practices that resemble interpersonal communication” (p. 71). Because of lower barriers to identification with group identity due to an inclusive environment with diverse participation and engaging, understandable PAFs, the characteristics of connective action align quite well with those of participatory culture. Popular examples of PAFs used by XR and FF in the form of hashtags are #ActNow, #EverybodyNow and #RebelVoices. Any single personalized action frame is not crucial for motivating participation, but taken together, they are central to mobilizing movements in a time of what Bennett (2012) calls ‘personalized politics’ (p.22). In fact, the more diverse and inclusive the mobilization, the more personalized the messages become (p. 21).
An effective way to frame contentious personalized politics is with brief, succinct messaging. With a 280-character limit, Twitter is an ideal medium for short messages to followers.
However, the hashtag, the feature that affords users the ability to index subjects to be found by an
even wider network of users, can also tell a story. Indeed, Papacharissi (2015) notes that in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, PAFs were ‘woven into a narrative that framed the movement as a revolution (p. 70). Bennett and Segerberg (2012) employ the use of the tern ‘personalized action formations’ when talking about such narratives. The climate change issue at hand, being communicated with technology deployments (smartphones, social media) and PAFs, is the same issue being communicated in newsletters and lecture halls. In other words, the social issues addressed under a logic of connective action can be the same as those dealt with under a logic of collective action, ‘but the ideas and mechanisms for organizing action become more personalized than in cases where action is organized on the basis of social group identity, membership, or ideology’ (p. 746).
3.3 Collective action frames of climate emergency and protest
Framing is defined as “[selection] of some aspects of a perceived reality and [making] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described”
(Entman, 1993:52). Entman et al. (2008) find that framing occurs in culture, in the minds of elites, in the minds of professional communicators and their texts, and in the minds of the audience.
Frames can also be defined as ‘central organizing ideas that provide coherence to a designated set of idea elements’ (Ferree et al., 2002:105). This thesis, in part, aims to examine how frames presented by XR and FFF ‘offer ways of understanding that imply the need for and desirability of some form of action’ (Gamson, 1992:7) while comparing their ‘idea elements’ to themes and concept raised in politician interviews.
Frame analysis ‘examines the selection and salience of certain aspects of an issue by
exploring images, stereotypes, metaphors, actors, and messages’ (Matthes, 2009). This thesis
utilizes this view of frame analysis in the use of units of analysis within tweets: text, hashtags,
imagery (still imagery and video stills). Goffman’s (1974) pioneering work in frame analysis states
that frames act to allow people to "locate, perceive, identify, and label" experiences (p. 21). For
this thesis, PAFs and collective action frames will be analyzed in texts of tweets. Additionally, imagery will be used for a PAF analysis and hashtags will be used in an innovative collective action frame analysis. All of these units of analysis can act as frames when they provide social meaning on social media.
Collective action frames are values, beliefs and shared meaning that mobilize people; they are essentially a negotiated ideology. Through a ‘politics of signification’ and collective identity, motivating narratives are framed in an ongoing process (Benford & Snow, 2000:613-614). Such motivating narratives for FFF and XR include their demands or stated attempts to focus citizens on upcoming elections (Figures 3 and 4). A ‘logic of collective action’ sees protest as the ‘unified outcome of resource concentrations, structural features or the formation of collective identities’
(van Haperen, Nicholls & Uitermark 2018: 410). More specifically, a collective action frame can be couched in common injustice, agency and identity (Gamson, 1995). Achieving this, as difficult as it may be, has been important to social movements in history.
‘Diagnostic framing’ (problem identification and attribution), ‘prognostic framing’
(proposing a solution or plan) and ‘motivational framing’ (action mobilization) are the three ‘core framing tasks’ of collective action frames (Snow & Benford, 1988, from Benford & Snow, 2000:615-616). Using these kinds of frames, movements communicate the climate emergency on social media in a social practice that produces text. This collective framing by XR and FFF within text on Twitter is seen prominently in the tweet text itself and in the image. Image text seen on XR and FFF accounts appears in artwork accompanying short text frames and also in notices of meetings and protest actions.
This project aims to compare frames of identity and protest to codes assigned to the hashtags and tweet text of the dataset. Tweet texts will be coded as ‘collective action frame’ if they meet the criteria of showing values, shared meaning, ideology or everyday understandings (Benford & Snow, 2000). Hashtags will be classified into ‘core framing tasks’ of collective action frames as described above.
These phenomena exemplify how social media have given rise to new ways of constructing
meaning. Rigid ideology and formal group membership with set values and shared meanings are
not required for participation. Across horizontal communication networks like Twitter, unfettered
deliberation and coordination can occur, allowing loosely networked social movements greater autonomy. Previously unaffiliated citizens can contribute to more radical and rapid-response measures of modern climate movements. The question of agency in a Latourian actor network raises the question: Are social media platforms making these movements? In other words, are social media networks comprised of actors or are actors comprised of their social media networks (Latour, 1996)? Central to a logic of connective action is that social media are agents of organization (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012:753).
3.4 Social media effects
This section describes the social media logical context for the justification of this study, analysis of the data and drawing conclusions relevant to media and communication.
This thesis proposes that XR and FFF have pursued the goal of such a declaration using tactics related to ‘social media logic’ and ‘connective action’ as a supplement to the orthodox tactics related to ‘political logic’ and ‘collective action’. In this effort, these two climate movements are using corporate media structures’ own strategies against the corporate media landscape for their own purposes in an analogous fashion to the way European leftists have before them (Galis & Neumayer, 2016). This is accomplished through the characteristics of Jenkins’s participatory culture listed above. But how to avoid the pitfalls of loose connections in decentralized movements, surveillance of technology use, strict ideological values and meanings of membership in collectives?
In a globalized society, the global problem of climate change will not be solved by
individual states or even international organizations. This thesis proposes that social media part of
a public sphere that is mobilized through the democratized political participation that occurs in a
participatory culture. Traditional collective action on such a scale will not work without
engagement of the issue through an interconnected network. How to best connect disparate publics
in far-flung corners of the world? Connective action logic may explain how or why these networked
publics mobilized through the use of technology deployments, loose networks and PAFs. PAFs
and the use of affect in social media are relevant in this context. In connective action, organization
co-producing and co-distributing ideas. In this way, connective action can provide the proliferation, influence and interconnectedness to a collective action built by an organization (Lee
& Chan, 2018:107-108).
Social media logic dictates that Twitter influences institutions and perceptions, and in the case of declaring climate emergencies in European cities, the gesture is largely symbolic. It could be argued that the real motivator and goal is to spread awareness of a global problem, and for rich European countries to set an example for the whole world to follow once global awareness and mobilization reaches a tipping point for concrete action, as outlined by the IPCC.
The categories of PAF and collective action frame can overlap, such as when a personal frame becomes a media event in front of a crowd, such as the Greta Thunberg’s story about her refusal to speak at a younger age. Climate change was the issue that made her finally speak up, she states, and telling her story of overcoming this shyness in front of a crowd at a TED Talk is itself media event (Thunberg, 2018). This PAF, her identity and being seen in front of the Swedish Parliament all individualize diagnosing a larger point of a problem, posing a solution and mobilizing action. Through individualization of the problem and access to frames and information via social media, barriers to engagement online are lowered in an environment where contribution is appreciated. This is merely an example of how these movements are operating in the online and offline worlds, exemplifying the relationships between participatory culture and political participation using a logic of collective action.
Activists can use the model that corporate social media has used both to commodify activist ideas and to exploit their labor via nonhuman agency. This democratization of participatory culture can reverse the effects of the corporate ‘recuperation’ of activists’ ideas and the exploitation of digital labor by social media companies. By exploiting the nonhuman “cyber-material agency” of social media, activists can also take advantage of the energy and intensity of digital media users and change the structural organization of power and informational control hegemony (Galis &
Neumayer, 2016:4). This “cyber-material detournément” will account for algorithms and the logic of social media platforms in the democratic culture of activist participation (p. 4).
Instead of social media being used as a tool to commodify, it is being used by XR and FFF
to act in the putative public interest, using their identity to enhance their credibility. Instead of
youth being used to sell something, this identity is used by the youths themselves in an already
mediatized public sphere offline and online. The movements communicate attractive frames that may be self-serving in this way, but purport to be generated in the name of the public interest.
Because these frames are so attractive, large protests with these credible actors are more easily shared, broadcasted and accessed in a global networked society.
Collective action on Twitter could be seen on the streets in real time with mass arrests, police clearing a public space (or failing to do so) or a successful action like a “die-in’ or people gluing themselves to a corporate office building’s front door. Participatory culture can be shown in messages of gratitude to participants, in congratulations to a movement leader or a in a celebration of a climate emergency declaration. Not all of these instances not represent actual achievement of palpable change, but these movements have been able to successfully achieve their goals of drawing public and media attention to their action, their movements and the climate change issue. Castells (2015) proclaims that ‘(w)hen the process of communicative action induces collective action and change is enacted, the most potent positive emotion prevails: enthusiasm, which powers purposive social mobilization’ (p.247). This mobilization is, etymologically speaking, a goal of any purported social movement pursuing this collective action. But how to get there? How does a loosely connected collective network become a mobilized movement?
3.5 (Social) media logic and (social) mediatization
This section presents key theories and concepts for analysis of results and drawing concusions. According to Altheide and Snow (1979), media logic is a ‘way of life’ in which media characteristics influence societal institutions and dominate people’s perception of social and public affairs (pp.10, 237). Media logic is synonymous with ‘mass media logic’ for the purposes of distinguishing it from social media logic, when necessary, as in van Dijk & Poell (2013:3).
Hjarvard (2008) describes mediatization as ‘the process whereby society to an increasing degree
is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic’(p.113). In other words,
mediatization is an adaptation to media logic (Brommesson & Ekengren, 2017:1). Schillemans
(2012) describes mediatization as “(h)ow the mass media are the agent of change for other
institutions” (p.16). Mediatization could also be described either as “the growing intrusion of
media logic as an institutional rule into other fields where it now supplements (and in extreme cases replaces) existing rules for defining appropriate behavior” or “a media-induced change that is characterized by the institutionalization of media logic in social spheres that were previously considered separate from the mass media” (Esser, 2013:160-161).
As asked by van Dijck and Poell (2013), ‘what happens when social media logic meets other institutional logics outside the context of social media platforms’ (p.11)? Schrott’s (2009) gradual ‘displacement of political logic through media logic’ is investigated here in the case of the climate emergency declarations, FFF and XR. Whereas the replacement of political logic with mass media logic (television, radio and newspapers) could be considered as the media reporting what they think the public is interested in rather than reporting what is in the public interest (Brannts & van Praag, 2017), activists tweeting in the name of the public interest is a relatively new social phenomenon. A social media logic incorporated by climate activists has arguably garnered more media attention and made larger progress in public awareness and participation in the climate change issue than more established civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations. Organizations like GreenPeace, Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU) and Bund für Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) have broader environmentalist goals and operate with a political logic by lobbying for legislation. While XR and FFF have had contacts with governments to push their agenda, their decentralized power structure and identity is that of apolitical youth (FFF) or radicals (XR).
According to van Dijck and Poell (2013), social media has ‘changed the conditions and rules of social interaction’ and a social media logic is ‘the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpinning its (social media’s) dynamics’ (p.2). In order to meet their goals, contemporary climate movements cannot afford to ignore social media logic because they are part of a participatory media culture where ‘the social gets infiltrated by a revamped media logic’ (p.
11).
In this study, we have a change from traditional mass media as primary sources of political
messages to social media joining this group, undoubtedly for some people passing newspapers and
TV as a primary source of political messages. This shift, likely an artefact of the ubiquity of
smartphones and social media platforms in modern life, is contributing to a cultural and societal
shift of how political messages are constructed, transmitted and received. It is most evident here
that the shift from a (more) political logic to a media logic with political aims. The participatory culture of social media appears to contribute to this shift. XR and FFF appear to be using this phenomenon to increase political participation.
Even if newspaper articles and TV programs are viewed online or shared on social media this is yet a further example of the process of social media weaving its way through a society, forcing other institutions (e.g., politics, traditional mass media) to lose their autonomy via internalization by institutional (political and media) actors (Brommesson & Ekengren, 2017:4;
Strömbäck, 2008:239). If politicians who vote on a climate emergency declaration are affected in this way by movements whose primary form of media communication is social media, a ‘social mediatization’ of societal institutions is taking place.
3.6 Actor-network theory and Twitter
At the same time, social media content can be organized and published in mass media outlets and the information posted to other social media platforms ( see Figure 7). Interestingly, the Welt Instagram post from May 3, 2019 about the first climate emergency declaration was the genesis of this project. This section will discuss the implications of actor networks in social media and provide a groundwork for analysis of quantitative and qualitative data.
What is happening when the social media logic of FFF and XR interacts with other logics, such as connective action logic and collective action logic?
Citizens’ communication of the urgency to act on climate change is today being used with the short media frames (text and imagery) afforded by ubiquitous social media platforms like Twitter. This particular platform acts in an actor network where such frames and traditional mass media can be:
1) distributed via network nodes (Twitter accounts with many followers) and
2) driven by Twitter via the journalists and public figures who produce and influence
mass media (TV, radio, print)
This study examines the tweets of major international and local (interviewee city and major event) accounts of XR and FFF. These include two public figures that lead FFF, Greta Thunberg and Luisa Neubauer, a youthful German university student with 158 700 followers who acts as a kind of spokesperson for FFF. These network nodes were considered in this study to be influential and voices of the movement, though these movements have a decentralized, horizontal power structure. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) includes not only humans as actors, but also nonhuman, nonindividual entities to describe the nature of societies (Latour, 1996). In the view of this theory, all social phenomena, such as these climate protests and the climate emergency declarations, result from interactions within networks. These networks include the politician interviewees who voted on the climate emergency declarations, whether or not they read Twitter. They consume media content produced by someone who has seen movement tweets within a social-mediatized, networked public sphere. Twitter is ‘possibly the ultimate breaking news tool’ due to the real-time, multidirectional information exchange it provides, as well as the fact that journalists and politicians typically use it more than the rest of society (Parmelee, 2014, p. 444). These platforms ‘restore agency to users, enabling active and interactive capacities, in contrast to what with radio, television, and film was a one-way disposition of passive consumption’ (Foshay, 2011:6).
An actor ‘is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it’ (Latour, 2005:46). Lindgren (2017) explains that by aggregating the actions of human actors, networks become ‘a form of aggregated actors in their own right ‘(p. 121).
Anyone seeking to exercise power over public agendas must affect the goals and connectivity of other networks (Castells, 2004; Lindgren, 2017). A new subject, such as the climate emergency declaration, can emerge this way via actor networks in a networked society.
A networked public can be defined as ‘(1) the space constructed through networked
technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people,
technology, and practice’ (boyd, 2020:39 from Fuchs, 2014:187). A social-mediatized public is
evident in Figure 7, where a loose actor network (Fridays For Future Konstanz followers) with
weak ties on Twitter exhibits a unique strength online when utilizing media imagery of a climate
emergency declaration in a city council, which is sent to the mass media through network nodes
and back into the online realm through the Welt news website and the next day, their Instagram
account.
Fig. 7. FFF Konstanz tweet (top) reporting the first climate emergency declaration in Germany is embedded on Welt website (May 2, 2019) and the news is posted to Welt
Instagram account (bottom) (May 3, 2019).
