Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament

Robin Schaefer, Christoph Abels, Stephan Lewandowsky, Manfred Stede


Abstract
Twitter and parliamentary speeches are very different communication channels, but many members of parliament (MPs) make use of both. Focusing on the topic of climate change, we undertake a comparative analysis of speeches and tweets uttered by MPs in Germany in a recent six-year period. By keyword/hashtag analyses and topic modeling, we find substantial differences along party lines, with left-leaning parties discussing climate change through a crisis frame, while liberal and conservative parties try to address climate change through the lens of climate-friendly technology and practices. Only the AfD denies the need to adopt climate change mitigating measures, demeaning those concerned about a deteriorating climate as climate cult or fanatics. Our analysis reveals that climate change communication does not differ substantially between Twitter and parliamentary speeches, but across the political spectrum.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
479–496
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.42
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.42
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robin Schaefer, Christoph Abels, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Manfred Stede. 2023. Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 479–496, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament (Schaefer et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.42.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.42.mp4