Committed Participation or Flashes of Action? Mobilizing Public Attention to Climate on Twitter, 2011–2015

Abstract

Climate advocacy organizations are increasingly focused on citizen mobilization via social media as a strategy, proposing that by mobilizing the existing climate issue public into expressive action they will better be able to pressure policy makers. This paper explores the origins of and rates of participation in bursts of collective attention to the climate issue on Twitter over a five-year period. We find low levels of repeated user participation over time in spikes of public attention to climate on Twitter, while also identifying a small group of organizations and individuals who are “serial” participants in climate actions on Twitter. The high rate of participant turnover suggests continued questions about how to sustain public attention to the climate issue over time.