A New Generation of Climate Activism
Visualizing Twitter Data on Fridays For Future Movement
Read MoreAbout Fridays For Future
Since Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old climate activist, started the “school strike for climate” outside of Swedish parliament in August 2018, the solo protest has snowballed into a global wave of strikes. The movement reached its peak moment with an estimated 4 to 7.6 million people marching on the street in September 2019. Thunberg, who received wide recognition from the public and the mainstream media, helped to bring the climate crisis to the center stage on the world’s political agenda. Yet, this movement and its young leader were not free from skepticism for its “impractical” demand on carbon emission targets and failure to offer concrete environmental solutions against climate change.
About Our Project
As a youth-lead global social movement, social media has become the key platform to coordinate, participate and discuss the Fridays For Future. Take a snapshot of its peak moment on Twitter, this interactive data visualization analysis project illustrates the trending topics and milestone events, identify the key influencers and their connections on social media, as well as the geographical scale of the social movement. Our project will reveal how a new generation of young climate activists’ messages are gaining ground through coordinated self-expression and collective actions for social change on social media.
This interactive data visualization project is best viewed on a desktop/laptop.
Approach
123841
Total Tweets
9/16 - 9/30, 2019
Timeframe
Trending Keywords
We calculated “burst scores” to illustrate the trending keywords appearing more frequently than expected between September 16 to 30, 2019.
Social Network
We graphed twitter accounts based on their network relations defined by mentions (i.e. @) appears in tweets.
Trending Topics
We tracked the changes of top 15 most frequently used hashtags during FridaysforFuture’s two global strikes (Sept 21, Sept 27) and Greta Thunberg’s UN Speech (Sept 23).
Geographic Map
We mapped 26,122 tweets with available location data between September 16 to 30, 2019. Tweets are color coded based on language.
Our Process
Trending Keywords
Each cell shows the “burst score” of a word and darker color represents a higher burst score. Burst score indicates to what extent a word exceeds the estimated level of frequency on that day.
Click on each cell to see sample tweets that provide the context of the word in the discussion of Fridays For Future.
Milestone Events
During the September 16-30, three important events mark the milestone moments of the Fridays For Future movement.
On September 21, 2019 Fridays For Future launched a global strike with 4 million participants (estimated by the organizers) in thousands of cities and towns.
On September 23, 2019 Greta Thunberg delivered an emotional speech at United Nations’ Climate Action Summit to urge the world leader to make a commitment to address global warming. Thunberg’s words “How dare you?” mark a major moment of the Fridays For Future movement.
On September 27, 2019 Greta Thunberg led half a million protesters in Montreal and met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trending Topics
Most frequently used hashtags across three milestone events were traced to show the trending topics over time. Hashtags are grouped based on four categories: strike, Greta Thunberg, climate emergency, national politics.
Network of Influencers
Networks of Twitter accounts were connected through mentions in tweets. Each Twitter account is sized by the number of mentions it receives from others in the network. activists, opposers, politicians/political parties, environmental organizations, media and are important actors who are threading together in the discussions of Fridays for Future.
Trending Topics
- ◈Strike
- ▲Climate Emergency
- ◽National Policy
- ◉Greta Thunberg
Event Timeline
Network of Influencers
- Activists
- Politicians
- Environmental Org.
- Media
- Opposers
- Others
Map of Fridays For Future
As a global environmental movement, Fridays For Future strikes took place in more than 50 countries and using 38 different languages around the world. Here is the map that showcases the geographic location of tweets. Since not all twitter accounts and tweets have geo-tag data available on Twitter, we mapped 26,122 tweets with available location data to track the change of tweets volume over the 15 days period.
Among the 38 different languages, we placed the top 10 languages with most tweets in our data on this map.
Click on each language in the legend to show the geographic locations of tweets (written in that language).
Summaries
A movement about future
Greta Thunberg, leader of the Fridays For Future movement, is among many other young activists who have become the center of climate activism in recent years.Our data visualization project showed that Thunberg, her speech (e.g. #howdareyou) and her achievements (e.g. received Amnesty Ambassador of Conscience Award; nominated for Noble Peace Prize) are ranked high in the trending topics and hashtags on Twitter.
Differ from previous generations of climate activists, Thunberg gained moral authority as a child whose message coincides with the adults’ increasing concern of negative climate impacts on children and grandchildren generations as found in public opinion surveys worldwide. However, the moral integrity represented by Thunberg was not immune to the backlash from the anti-climate change individuals and politicians, who criticized her “privileged” lifestyle and Fridays For Future’s radical resemblance of “antifa”.
Rising wave of global concern
Fridays For Future spread to more than 50 countries with tweets in 16 different languages during our research period. Fridays for Future comes at the time with increasing concerns of climate change globally. It has become a consensus among majorities that global climate change is a major threat to their nations, according to Pew Research Center’s survey in 14 countries. However, the global participation had a geographic bias, we could see that participations are more visible in the developed countries and strikes were highlighted due to their scales in the big cities such as Berlin, Milan, Montreal.
Adults are listening?
For any environmental movement, the challenge has always been the ability to translate the movement into influence on government decisions. We found anecdotal evidence that Fridays For Future was used to push the national policy making process.
In Germany, for instance, the #symbolpolitik is used by activists to urge the governing parties to reach agreement on a 50 billion euro climate package to meet the country's carbon emission by 2030. In general, social networks of activists and environmental organizations centered on Thunberg rather than effectively engaging the policy decision makers.
Future long-term and systematic policy researches are needed to determine whether Fridays For Future’s is simply symbolic politics or an effective way to influence the decision making process.