Climate change communication from cities in the USA

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.Cities in the USA engage in action on climate change, even as the federal government remains resistant to comprehensive climate policy. While experts generally agree that local level adaptation and mitigation policies are critical to avoiding the worst climate impacts, the degree to which cities communicate climate change issues to their constituents has yet to be fully explored. In this article, we evaluate how US cities communicate climate change-related issues, problems, and policies. We use a computer-assisted approach to evaluate climate change efforts by cities by examining the full text of press releases of 82 large cities in the USA. We first identify who discusses climate change, finding that many large cities in the USA address climate change in their public communication. Second, we examine the content of these discussions. Many cities discuss weather-related concerns in conjunction with broad collaborative efforts to address global warming, while city-based policy discussions focus more on energy and transportation efforts. Third, we evaluate the local factors associated with these discussions. We find that the city’s climate vulnerability is particularly influential in shaping the level and timing of climatic communication

Political Speech in Religious Sermons

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, few opportunities emerge to directly observe political discussions in a wide set of religious settings. We examine the nature of these political discussions with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political discussions in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of ten pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic process to link the sermon data to demographic and political information around the church as well as information about the church and pastor to evaluate variation of political discussion in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—discuss most political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Communicating climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in American cities

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.City governments have a large role to play in climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, given that urban locales are responsible for disproportionately high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are on the “front lines” of observed and anticipated climate change impacts. This study examines how US mayors prioritize climate policies within the context of the city agenda. Employing a computer-assisted content analysis of over 2886 mayoral press releases related to climate change from 82 major American cities for the period 2010–2016, we describe and explain the extent to which city governments discuss mitigation and adaptation policies in official communications. Specifically, we rely on a semi-supervised topic model to measure key climate policy themes in city press releases and examine their correlates using a multilevel statistical model. Our results suggest that while mitigation policies tend to dominate the city agenda on climate policy, discussion of adaptation efforts has risen dramatically in the past few years. Further, our statistical analysis indicates that partisanship influences city discussion on a range of climate policy areas—including emissions, land use policy, and climate resiliency—while projected vulnerability to climatic risks only influences discussion of climate resiliency and adaptation efforts.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

The ‘Tarrant effect’: what impact did far-right attacks have on the 8chan forum?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordThis paper analyses the impact of a series of mass shootings committed in 2018-2019 by right-wing extremists on 8chan/pol, a prominent far-right online forum. Using computational methods, it offers a detailed examination of how attacks trigger shifts in both forum activity and content. We find that while each shooting is discussed by forum participants, their respective impact varies considerably. We highlight, in particular, a “Tarrant effect”: the considerable effect Brenton Tarrant’s attack of two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, had on the forum. In the double context of the rise in far-right terrorism and the growing and diversifying online far-right ecosystem, such interactive offline-online effects warrant the attention of both scholars and security professionals.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

To Polarize or Not: Comparing Networks of News Consumption

This is the final version. Available via the link in this record.We use individual data on browsing histories combined with survey data to examine whether online news exposure exhibits signs of segregation and selectivity. By using online news behaviour combined with survey reports of attitudes, we can capture exposure to both traditional news sources and news shared via social media platforms. Most importantly, we can also examine what types of individuals (e.g. partisans, educated) are more likely to exhibit selective tendencies. We find, consistent with recent empirical work, the extent of segregation in exposure may be overstated. Furthermore, the degree of segregation and selectivity varies across groups that are defined by holding shared political preferences. For example, in the case of Brexit, those who supported the ‘Leave’ side were more selective in their news exposure. Our approach allows comparison of news exposure patterns by domains versus news exposure to topics. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis to allow this comparison.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council ES/N012283/1 "Measuring Information Exposure in Dynamic and Dependent Networks (ExpoNet)

Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change

This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: The analysis data is available at https://socialanalytics.ex.ac.uk/cards/data.zip; The classifiers are available at https://socialanalytics.ex.ac.uk/cards/models.zipCode availability: The analysis code is available at https://github.com/traviscoan/cardsA growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by 1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, 2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, 3) developing a computational model to accurately classify specific claims, and 4) drawing on an extensive corpus from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS) Research Fellowshi

Discussion of Climate Change on Reddit: Polarized Discourse or Deliberative Debate?

This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: The data used in this study is from two publicly available datasets on bigquery: the fh-bigquery:reddit_posts project available at bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts, and the fh-bigquery:reddit_comments project available at: bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments. The data was accessed on 05/02/2019.Studies of climate discourse on social media platforms often find evidence of polarization, echo chambers, and misinformation. However, the literature’s overwhelming reliance on Twitter makes it difficult to understand whether these phenomena generalize across other social media platforms. Here we present the first study to examine climate change discourse on Reddit, a popular – yet understudied – locus for climate debate. This contributes to the literature through expansion of the empirical base for the study of online communication about climate change beyond Twitter. Additionally, platform architecture of Reddit differs from many social media platforms in several ways which might impact the quality of the climate debate. We investigate this through topic modeling, community detection, and analysis of sources of information on a large corpus of Reddit data from 2017. Evidence of polarization is found through the topics discussed and sources of information shared. Yet, while some communities are dominated by particular ideological viewpoints, others are more suggestive of deliberative debate. We find little evidence for the presence of polarized echo chambers in the network structure on Reddit. These findings challenge our understanding of social media discourse around climate change and suggest that platform architecture plays a key role in shaping climate debate online.University of ExeterLeverhulme TrustEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC