Analysis of general experiences with engaging in climate-related social media groups could provide a more nuanced picture. But such research tends to focus on professional actors and influential users. As we demonstrate, existing research foregrounds a polarised and compartmentalised landscape, with social media used for spreading information and mobilising supporters. This example could be taken to illustrate that social media fuel distrust and divides on contentious political issues. In a country with merely 5 million inhabitants, each Facebook group gathered more than 100,000 members in few weeks in February 2020, and the situation received attention from national news media, who reported that a “full-on climate war” was taking place on Facebook ( NTB/Aftenposten, 2020). First, a group that described climate action as hysteria got traction, but soon a second group formed in reaction to this specific initiative, and to the broader inclination to question climate science. As the field of climate communication holds a long-running interest in understanding the role of social media, this article contributes to the extant literature with a qualitative study of sense-making as part of everyday social media use, expanding on functions already defined in the literature.Ī starting point for our study was a situation that arose in the Norwegian public debate in early 2020, when seemingly entrenched Facebook warfare broke out between two groups engaged in climate issues. Social media could function as a double-edged sword, enabling both communication with large publics and rapid spread of misinformation – at the same time and through the same platforms (see van Dijck & Alinead, 2020 on the Covid-19 pandemic Rosenthal, 2020 on science videos). Such engagement could find many different expressions, related to affordances of various social media platforms, via the experiences and interests of diverse users, and to the complexities of climate change as a scientific and societal issue. From Greta Thunberg urging us to “listen to science” on Twitter, to the sharing of conspiracy theories on YouTube, social media have become part of how people engage with climate change.
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