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Climate polarization is increasing on Twitter

Analysis of tweets relating to the Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summits reveals greater polarization during COP26 than during previous summits. This increase in polarization is associated with growing right-wing engagement and emerged following the global climate strikes in 2019. Surprisingly, one topic unites pro-climate and climate-sceptic groups — ‘political hypocrisy’ — accusations of which have increased since 2019.

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Fig. 1: Polarized communities during COP26.

References

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This is a summary of: Falkenberg, M. et al. Growing polarization around climate change on social media. Nat. Clim. Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01527-x (2022).

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Climate polarization is increasing on Twitter. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 1094–1095 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01533-z

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