| Riassunto: | <p>Effective environmental communication and activism are critical to the development of public support for the policies, ideological shifts, and behavioural changes needed to systemically address climate change. The last five years have seen a significant increase in global environmental activism on social media, yet there are still many gaps in our understanding of the strategies used, their effectiveness, and the challenges they face in supporting the pro-environmental movement.</p>
<p>This thesis presents a combination of interdisciplinary case studies examining three under-studied contexts of environmental communication and activism on social media. Together, they advance our understanding of important dynamics impacting the effectiveness of online activism and provide motivation for key methodological shifts in the way scholars approach researching this topic.</p>
<p>The thesis begins with general motivation and contextualisation of the work in Chapter 1. Then, I provide an overview of the research which has analysed environmental communication and activism on social media so far and identify key blind spots in Chapter 2. I then present four empirical chapters, each addressing one of these gaps using mixed-method and interdisciplinary computational social science approaches.</p>
<p>The first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) addresses commercial engagement and controversy in vegan activism as a site of targeted environmental activism. The second empirical chapter (Chapter 4) investigates the relationship between psycholinguistic framing in posts of environmental activists and audience engagement on Twitter. The third empirical chapter (Chapter 5) presents an experiment in which the correlational findings of the previous chapter, and a potential cognitive mechanism driving them, are investigated offline. The fourth and final empirical chapter (Chapter 6) compares the topic and sentiment framing used to discuss COP26 conference outcomes in a sample of English-language mainstream (Australia, India, UK, and US) and social media (Facebook and Instagram), paying particular attention to how different stakeholders (major news outlets, politicians, activists, and NGOs) overlap and diverge in their commentary and discussing what implications this has for the development of coherent public dialogue on environmental policy moving forward.</p>
<p>To wrap up the thesis, the Conclusion (Chapter 7) summarises the empirical work and individual contributions of each chapter. It also discusses contributions of the thesis as a whole, bringing the findings of each study into conversation with one another to motivate the importance for future research to 1) take increasingly interdisciplinary approaches to the study of environmental activism and evaluations of its effectiveness, and 2) move away from social media-only studies and connect social media dynamics to micro- and macro-level offline outcomes.</p>
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