The Amazon rainforest is up in flames as the Twitter world gets caught in their own heated debate. Since August 26, 2019, the forest fires have been large enough to be visible from the International Space Station. In the midst of this highly political environmental calamity, the hashtag “AmazonFire” has been trending on Twitter as users express their frustration and heartbreak. This analysis will break down the composition of a corpus of roughly 100 tweets with the hashtag "AmazonFire" pulled at random from August 21, 2019 until August 28, 2019.
The tweets used in this analysis were filtered so that any retweets and tweets in languages other than English were taken out. For this specific study, taking out other languages increases the bias of the study, since the event itself is taking place in Brazil. Many tweets that were filtered out were in Portugese and Spanish and provided a more primary insight from those physically closer to the fires and more directly affected by the politics. Additionally, the categorization of each tweet required interpretive decisions on the part of the researcher.
Most of the tweets that were in the corpus were in support of taking action to help put the fires out. At they very least, they were in support of raising awareness of the situation and concerned with the disaster. This group made up about 86.7% of the tweets. There were a few individuals who were against providing help for the fires. This group made up about 3% of the tweets and were mostly emphasizing that people who were in support were wasting their time. There were very negative connotations to their tweets. The final 10.3% of this group had very neutral tweets. They either tweeted the hashtag, AmazonFire, by itself or were purely informing with no official stance.
There were a few hashtags that were commonly used among tweets that also contained ‘#AmazonFire’. The top hashtag being “AmazonasFire” and followed by “Amazonas”. Tweets that contained these hashtags were mostly in languages other than English. This is most likely because the State of Amazonas is an area in Brazil but also the word ‘amazonas’ is both a Portugese and Spanish word for ‘Amazons’ and ‘Amazon’ respectively. The hashtag “Bolsonaro” was also highly tweeted with the other tags. Jair Bolsonaro is the Brazilian president who is receiving a lot of backlash for how he is managing the fires. Most of the tweets with this hashtag were very political.
Bolsonaro blames indigenous protection policies for limiting Brazil's economy as Amazon burns: The Co-ordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon vows to fight the country's far-right government https://t.co/7uXcmuSkn3 #AmazonFire #Bolsonaro #ClimateCrisis
— Morning Star (@M_Star_Online) August 28, 2019
Another form of analysis for this corpus was based on whether the tweets were designed to appeal to their respective audiences. The split between ethos, pathos, and logos used in each tweet was very significant. About 20% of the tweets used ethos. These were tweets that did not rely on emotional arguments, but rather backed up their points with articles or quotes of politicians to sound more credible. This leads into the 29% of tweets that used logic and facts to back up their arguments. They encouraged support based on the hard evidence that has been found regarding the fires. The largest group by far, however, was the group that used pathos to argue their points. Many of them were begging for help from others by appealing to, and almost fully relying on, emotion. They used images and videos that were very graphic and heart wrenching. One of the most used photos among the tweets is one that could be considered a form of propaganda. It is an image of lungs that shows what a healthy environment looks like, versus one that is in flames. This argument often tied in with the repeating fact among the tweets that stated that the amazon rainforest is responsible for 20% of the world’s oxygen production.
Brazil's Amazon #rainforest is #burning at a record rate. The #Amazon is often referred to as the planet's lungs, producing 20% of the #oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere pic.twitter.com/xCeQuTJLSk
— Raak (@Raak4mPak) August 23, 2019
The final method of analysis for this corpus of tweets was categorizing them based on their rationale for arguing. There were five main categories of arguments: environmental, redirection, informing, calling to action, and emotional. About 40% of tweets had facts, numbers, or were just simply informing others about what was happening. These were put into the informing category. Many of these tweets had other rationale as well; however, their main rationale was to explain the happenings. The next highest category was surprisingly redirection at about 21%. These tweets were using the trending hashtag to reach a wider audience but had nothing to do with the actual amazon fires. They were also using the fires to promote something completely unrelated to the Amazon itself. For example, a tree planting organization was trying to gain support by acknowledging that there are trees burning in an entirely different continent.
It 's Time to Give back to the Earth the Green that We took away. Replanting Trees is a #business where All Win, #environment , #economy , and All of Us. A single Word .com #domainname : https://t.co/4rUVQB39fJ #AmazonFires #AmazonFire #SaveTheEarth #AmazonasFire #AmazonasSOS pic.twitter.com/kfKDDANpxt
— TopDomainsList (@TopDomainsList) August 28, 2019
The trailing rationales were emotional, environmental, and calling to action. The emotional tweets were those that, again, used the videos and pictures of animals suffering or the forest itself burning. The environmental rationale was universal through most of the tweets by nature; however, the tweets that were categorized as environmental were the ones that solely outlined environmental concerns. The call to action tweets were those that linked to fundraisers and encouraged donations. They were also the tweets that encouraged reaching out to politicians to solve the problem.
Analyzing a corpus of tweets based on a hashtag led to some interesting findings. Unlike traditional, formal arguments, tweets approach debate from a different perspective. There is very little regulation with twitter other than the character limit and selective screening of sensitive content by algorithms created by Twitter. This means that people can reach huge audiences across the world and say almost whatever they want. As a result of this, many of the top and most influential tweets had little to no hard evidence. If it were a formal argument, on a traditional outlet this would not be as acceptable or gain as much of a following. There is also a difference in who has power compared to traditional arguments. Since Twitter is available across the world, anyone with internet access and an account can share their insight and contribute to the argument using the hashtag. This is why language is such an important factor in this analysis. If it were to be taken one step forward, it would be beneficial to translate all tweets and compare their content to different languages.