Public and scientific climate action messaging on Twitter

Ambitious and legitimate climate action requires extensive public discussion, with social media serving as an important forum. This study analyzes over 6.4 million English tweets on ‘climate action’ from 2021, posted by the general public (1.25 million users; two-thirds of tweets) and over 3,000 climate scientists working on climate change on the then-dominant climate discussion platform, Twitter. We examined the themes, emotional and moral sentiment, and tweet effectiveness measured by retweets. Our findings reveal a disconnect between frequently used communication strategies and their effectiveness. While tweeting about climate change mitigation and climate politics using positive language was common, it was only weakly associated with retweet counts. Conversely, the most effective strategies—tweeting about fossil fuels and using negative (including negative moralization) language—were infrequent. Our study contributes to the understanding of how social media platforms can be used to effectively communicate about climate action strategies and policies.