Headlines and Hashtags: Climate News and Online Engagement

In our technologically saturated society, social media platforms increasingly shape public perception of urgent issues, including climate change. However, despite rising media exposure and a significant increase in climate-related disasters, public concern about climate change has not increased proportionally. Using data from over 10 million tweets and 140,000 news articles from 2016 to 2018, this study examines the relationship between media coverage and online engagement with climate change. The analysis compares the volume and sentiment of climate-related news stories with patterns in climate-related tweets. While a modest positive correlation appears between the sentiment of tweets and news articles, negative correlations emerge across most other measures. In particular, higher volumes of climate-related news coverage are associated with lower average stance and sentiment in climate-related tweets, and the average stance of tweets is negatively correlated with the sentiment of news articles. These findings suggest that increased media coverage may not foster public urgency as expected, raising questions about the role of news media in shaping public perception of politicized issues and highlighting the need for further research on the dynamics of media influence.