MAKING CLIMATE CHANGE VISIBLE: FACEBOOK

Group members:

Question:

How is climate change visualized on Facebook by expert organizations?

Method:

Facebook was used as an initial means of analyzing 10 “expert” climate organization pages, using the Netvizz Facebook API tool. We collected all of the timeline images on the following pages:

1. Campaigns Against Climate Change

2. Climate Central.org

3. Climate Change.org

4. Climate Outreach.org

5. Climate Reality.org

6. Greenpeace International.org

7. Nasa.gov

8. Nature.com/nature climate change

9. Met Office.gov.uk

10. Friends of The Earth International

The tool provided us with a tabular file of metadata on each image providing the image id, image name, created time, link to the Facebook page, link to the image url, like count, reaction count and comment count for each image. We then ranked the 10 individual data sets by highest reaction count to determine the top 10 most popular/ engaged with images across these organization pages. Using the DownThemAll Firefox Module, we downloaded the top 100 images for further coding analysis. Both Met Office UK and Friends of the Earth international were then excluded from the data set on the basis that their images did not directly relate to issues of climate change.