Climate change coverage in traditional media follows distinct attention cycles, especially during major events like UN climate change conferences. These events offer climate stakeholders, such as politicians, activists, and NGOs opportunities to communicate their positions. Social media allows these stakeholders to bypass traditional gatekeepers and assert their perspectives directly within the public discourse. Yet, little research has examined how various stakeholder groups use different social media platforms to engage in climate change discourse. Most prior studies have focused on individual actors or single platforms. This study addresses this gap by analyzing climate communication among diverse German climate stakeholders across four social media platforms, exploring three key dimensions. First, we investigate how stakeholders discuss climate change topics within digital public discourse. Second, we assess the differences in discourse across stakeholder types. Third, we compare the discourse across platforms in terms of frequency, framing, and responsibility attribution. Using quantitative content analysis, we examined 2,977 social media posts from 96 German climate stakeholders on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube during the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai. Our findings indicate that stakeholders emphasize different thematic aspects and apply different frames to discuss climate change. They also tend to engage with different platforms, leading to distinct climate discourses across the four platforms—not only in terms of stakeholder structures but also in the thematic structures. We interpret this as evidence of a fragmented digital climate discourse in Germany.

Haßler, J., Lübke, S., Ozornina, N., & Haim, M. (6/2025). Fragmentation of Digital Climate Change Discourse? Comparative Analysis of German Stakeholders’ Communication on Four Social Media Platforms. Presented at the 75th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Denver, CO. (content_copy)