WI 2025
Shifting Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping
Axel Bruns, Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan
- 5 June 2025 – WI 2025 conference, Berlin
Presentation Slides
Abstract
1. Introduction
As global heating continues, public debates about climate change also shift. Faced with mounting evidence of more frequent and extreme weather events around the globe, narratives opposing climate action have moved from outright climate change denial to delay tactics (Lamb et al., 2020; Painter et al., 2023). Conversely, advocates for climate action are making increasingly forceful arguments for urgent practical interventions.
Such discursive strategies can be observed in many nations, yet Australia makes for an especially useful case study: it is particularly exposed to the consequences of climate change, has experienced increasingly severe disasters including cyclones, floods, and bushfires across its diverse climatic zones; and features a parliamentary political system which spans the full breadth from outright climate change denial (amongst the conservative Coalition) through support for modest incremental initiatives (from Labor) to calls for urgent action (by the Greens). Additionally, a new group of ‘Teal’ independents (named after their campaigning colours) blending pro-business and environmental values has successfully challenged incumbent MPs perceived to be stalling climate action (Hendriks & Reid, 2024).
2. Data and Methods
This paper examines the evolution of Australian public debate on climate action over nearly seven years, from January 2018 to August 2024 (spanning significant extreme weather events in 2019/20 and a change of federal government in May 2022). We draw on data from CrowdTangle on public discussions on Facebook, filtered for public pages from Australia and for posts that contain one or more climate-related keywords. We chose Facebook because it remains the most popular social media platform in Australia (e.g. Park et al., 2022: 85); our data capture post content and engagement data from official political pages (parties, politicians, candidates), news outlets, civil society groups, activists, local community pages, and various other actors. The total dataset contains some 4.8 million posts.
We conduct a longitudinal analysis of this dataset using the practice mapping method (Bruns et al., 2024), which is especially useful in this context as CrowdTangle data contain no interaction network information. Practice mapping instead constructs networks between individual Facebook pages by systematically comparing them for similarities in their posting practices: this includes general language choices, specific climate change claims, references to other actors and entities, embedded links, images, and videos, and other discursive features that can be extracted from the post content – collectively, their posting practices. Pages are then clustered into larger groups based on the strength of affinities between their practices, which in turn also enables us to determine the relative alignment or opposition between these larger clusters. Fig. 1 shows a preliminary practice mapping network for our dataset, using only a limited set of content features, illustrating the detection of distinct discursive clusters.
Fig. 1: A map of distinct practices in the dataset, highlighting groups of pages engaging in climate action advocacy, climate change denial, and storm chasing. Other clusters have a specifically local or regional focus.
Practice mapping networks typically show several distinct clusters, featuring closely aligned actors that represent a particular discursive position; these clusters are in turn often grouped into larger discursive alliances that each stand for a broader agenda (e.g. for or against immediate climate action), and engage in an antagonistic and potentially polarised discursive struggle with each other.
3. Contribution
We construct such a practice mapping network for the entire multi-year dataset, identifying broad overall patterns of agonism and antagonism (Dehghan, 2020) in Australian climate debates, but also trace the positioning of individual pages in our dataset across this map over time – month by month and year by year. This charts the diachronic evolution of climate change discourses in Australia: actors originally engaged in outright climate change denialism might move towards climate action delay as denial becomes untenable in the face of the evidence; actors calling for modest global action might move towards support for more urgent local initiatives.
We pay particular attention to the impact of major unforeseen developments (bushfire and flood emergencies; protest actions) and regular events (annual climate summits; release of scientific reports; federal elections in 2019 and 2022) on discursive practices. We cross-reference these practices with user engagement metrics for pages and posts, to examine whether audience preferences for specific stances towards climate change also evolve over time, and potentially even whether this evolution precedes or lags behind discursive changes at the page level.
Applying practice mapping to a large-scale longitudinal dataset, this paper makes a unique contribution to the study of discursive shifts in public debate at a national level. Our work documents the diachronic contingency of discourses on endogenous or exogenous events; polarisation dynamics around climate action in Australia; and the resonance of arguments for or against urgent climate action amongst the broader public. It also serves as a blueprint for similar longitudinal studies of public debates on and across other platforms.
References
Bruns, Axel, Kateryna Kasianenko, Vishnu Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. 2024. “Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks.” arXiv: 2407.05956. http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05956
Dehghan, Ehsan. 2020. Networked Discursive Alliances: Antagonism, Agonism, and the Dynamics of Discursive Struggles in the Australian Twittersphere. PhD thesis. Queensland University of Technology. https://doi.org/10.5204/thesis.eprints.174604
Hendriks, Carolyn M., and Richard Reid. 2024. “Citizen-Led Democratic Change: How Australia’s Community Independents Movement Is Reshaping Representative Democracy.” Political Studies 72 (4): 1609–1631. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217231219393
Holmes à Court, Simon. 2023. The Big Teal. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing.
Lamb, William F., Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts, Stuart Capstick, Felix Creutzig, Jan C. Minx, Finn Müller-Hansen, Trevor Culhane, and Julia K. Steinberger. 2020. “Discourses of Climate Delay.” Global Sustainability 3: e17. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13
Painter, James, Joshua Ettinger, David Holmes, Loredana Loy, Janaina Pinto, Lucy Richardson, Laura Thomas-Walters, Kjell Vowles, and Rachel Wetts. 2023. “Climate Delay Discourses Present in Global Mainstream Television Coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 Report.” Communications Earth & Environment 4 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00760-2
Park, Sora, Kieran McGuinness, Caroline Fisher, Jee Young Lee, Kerry McCallum, and David Nolan. 2022. Digital News Report: Australia 2022. Canberra: News and Media Research Centre. https://apo.org.au/node/317946
