While science emphasizes the need for action in the face of the climate crisis, political efforts to curb climate change are progressing too slowly. As a result, numerous climate protest movements have been founded in recent years – from Fridays for Future to Ende Gelände to Extinction Rebellion. However, one of them has particularly stood out in recent German media coverage. In our research project, we are addressing the discourse surrounding the climate protest group “Die Letzte Generation” (“The Last Generation”), which, particularly in 2022, began to successfully generate (media) attention with its disruptive form of protest. Protest actions by the “Last Generation” include, among other things, gluing activists to streets or throwing food or paint at the glass panes of famous works of art. The climate protest group also engages in other actions, such as boycotting fossil fuel infrastructure, to draw attention to its political demands. These actions often seem to be described as polarized or polarizing in public discourse.
Despite continuous public and media attention and a controversial public discourse, there are few research projects to date that systematically address the extent to which the debate surrounding the “Last Generation” is polarized. Our project attempts to explore this question from a communication studies perspective. To this end, the German-language Twitter discourse and media coverage of the “Letzte Generation” will be comparatively analyzed to determine the extent to which the structure and content of these discourses are (affectively) polarized.
It also aims to identify cross-media and cross-platform connections between the Twitter and news debates about the “Last Generation.” This project thus aims to address questions of social negotiation and deliberation: Is reporting driven by supposedly polarized online debates? Do journalists succeed in setting their own thematic and content-related priorities? Do supposedly polarizing protest movements generate a kind of “contagious,” cross-platform media attention? And does this ultimately lead to a productive discourse about a necessary ecological transformation or merely to an emotionalized, empty, and identity-based debate in journalism and social media?
Data-driven research approach
The project addresses the challenge of polarized discourse in German-language social media and news. To analyze this discourse, we employ a solution approach that combines network analysis with manual and automated content analysis. Our data-driven approach aims to examine the online discourse and understand who is speaking in it and which frames are used (How is “Die Letzte Generation” discussed?). By combining social media and news discourse analysis, we choose an innovative and cross-media research approach that – at least to our knowledge – has not been used before on this complex of questions.
In a first step, we will examine our generated Twitter dataset, consisting of 1,444,428 tweets collected throughout 2022, for the most important frames using automated qualitative content analysis. These frames will be used in a next step to build an algorithmic transformer-based classifier that will be able to automatically detect frames related to the “Last Generation.” Using this classifier, we will then examine the extent to which frames are reflected on Twitter and in media coverage.
This project is affiliated with a research project at The New Institute Hamburg, which examines the polarization of sustainability and climate debates. In this way — as well as through information/workshop/outreach events with journalistic and (civil) society organizations — we hope to make the generated findings visible to a broader public.