Introduction:
Social media is often regarded as much more than just a place to connect with your friends. Twitter, even more than Instagram or Facebook, is often used as a source for news, an outlet to express one’s opinions regarding hot topics, and a place to tell funny jokes and make people laugh. Furthermore, due to the creation of the hashtag, users can easily access tweets that pertain to a certain subject via a simple search. Often, hashtags are used in tweets that address polarizing and/or interesting topics such as #GlobalWarming. In the case of global warming and other hot button issues, Twitter is an extremely popular outlet for people to express their opinions as well as inform other users about what is happening regarding a certain issue. In this research-based article, numerous tweets containing #GlobalWarming are analyzed in order to draw conclusions regarding the nature of the discourse surrounding this topic.
Methods:
The first step in this research process was to collect around 100 tweets that contained #GlobalWarming. In order to do so in a timely fashion, a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) was used. In order to avoid repetitiveness, the data was adjusted to filter out any re-tweets. Also, in order to only include tweets from semi-popular accounts, only tweets from people with 500+ followers were included. Once the tweets were filtered, the first 100 tweets available were pasted in to a separate google sheet. In this separate google sheet, each tweet was analyzed and categorized based on the following criteria: political affiliation of the user (Liberal or Conservative), rhetorical appeals utilized in the tweet (Ethos, Pathos, Logos), and purpose of the tweet itself (Informative, Opinion, Satirical/Joking). Charts were then constructed based on the results of these categorizations. In the next section of this report, these charts are analyzed in order to draw conclusions regarding the nature of tweets about global warming as well as the users tweeting them.
Results and Subsequent Conclusions:
Represented in Figure 1, around 75% of the of the users tweeting about #GlobalWarming were categorized as being affiliated with the liberal end of the political spectrum and the remaining 25% were representative of the conservative end. An interesting aspect of this is that there are triple the amount of "liberal" users tweeting about global warming in comparison to "conservative" users. This leads to the conclusion that users who identify with liberal ideologies are far more outspoken regarding global warming and climate change issues, at least when considering this hashtag. However, this is not to say that liberal users are simply more opinionated and would like to have their voices heard more. On the contrary, there is a possibility that conservative users simply do not care about the issue of global warming and would prefer to not speak on the topic at all rather than acknowledge it by throwing their two cents in a tweet. In more simple terms, conservative users would rather ignore the topic of global warming all together due to the fact that many of them believe it is a hoax or "fake science". However, a number of conservative users do want their opinions regarding global warming to be heard. This can be seen in the following tweet:
The pie chart in Figure 2 shows the purpose of the 100 tweets containing #GlobalWarming that were analyzed. It can be easily noted that the overwhelming majority of these tweets serve the purpose of either providing a certain user's opinion on climate change or informing the Twitter community about the issue itself. Not many tweets displayed humor. However, 13% of tweets were categorized as satirical/joking. Informative tweets consisted of actual facts or deductive reasoning as to why global warming is or is not an issue. An important finding here was that informative tweets were often replied to with a slew of opinionated tweets that either agreed or disagreed with the argument provided. This is representative of the argumentative platform that Twitter provides for its users. Another finding was that users who tweeted opinions that were either "far left" or "far right" in political terms often did not disclose their identity within their profiles. This shows an important aspect about internet arguments, which is that people feel much more comfortable and maybe even a bit bold when they are sharing their opinion in a manner that cannot be traced directly back to them. In other words, people feel like they can say much more behind a computer screen as opposed to in an actual face-to-face conversation.
It can be seen in Figure 3 that in tweets pertaining to global warming, logos and pathos are used significantly more often than ethos. This could be due to the fact that not many people give themselves credibility prior to providing their opinion or informing others about climate change on Twitter. For other polarizing topics such as abortion laws, a user may preface their tweet by saying they are a certified medical professional or expert of some sort. However, there are fewer climate change specialists represented in this sample. It should also be noted that many of the tweets that were categorized as either invoking "logos" or "pathos" contained some combination of the two. In other words, users often tend to either provide logic with some emotional backing or provide an emotionally-charged tweet with some logical backing. This is representative of the humanistic nature of the discourse on Twitter. Even in a strictly informational tweet, users often cannot help but invoke some sort of emotional reasoning.
Limitations to Analysis:
As with any other form of research, there are certain limitations to this analysis of tweets about global warming. First and foremost, the sample size used (100 tweets) is simply not large enough in order for the conclusions that have been drawn to be generalizable. However, the conclusions that were drawn from these results do provide insight in to the discourse of polarizing topics such as global warming on Twitter. Another limitation to this study is that all the tweets that were analyzed came from the same day. This also reduces the external validity of this study and makes it harder to generalize these findings to the average Twitter user. Throughout the study of tweets about Global Warming, much was learned about online discourse. A general takeaway from this research is that online discourse is much different from conversations people have in person regarding issues such as Global Warming. People often feel more comfortable in making polarizing statements when tweeting their opinions as opposed to saying them out loud. This leads to an "argumentative" tone being attributed to much of online discourse.