Platform Cultures and Emotional Communication About Climate Change: A Comparison of Affective Language in the Climate Change Blogo- and Twittersphere

Abstract

In recent years, climate change discussions have shifted from the blogosphere to platform cultures like Twitter (now X). However, it remains unclear how this shift has influenced the emotional tone of these conversations. In this preregistered study, we explored differences in affective and emotional language usage between English-language climate change blogs and tweets. Using sentiment classifiers, we analyzed two datasets: 2,633 blog posts from 18 blogs and 167,000 climate-related tweets. Contrary to expectations, blogs scored higher than tweets across all categories of affective language (positive and negative emotions, including fear, anger, sadness, disgust, joy, and surprise). Joy and surprise were the most frequently identified emotions in both datasets. On Twitter, positive-emotional language predicted higher engagement (likes and shares) more effectively than negative language or specific emotions. However, we observed differences depending on the sentiment classifiers used (Empath, Syuzhet, and VADER). These findings contribute to discussions of how different platform cultures influence climate change communication and affect the overall quality of the debate.