ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question whether the increasing usage of social media has also led to a change of the climate change discourse in the North Atlantic region. It focuses on two new kinds of actors in particular who could gain leverage with the erosion of traditional gatekeepers: populist climate sceptics on the one hand, and broad-based mass social movements seeking radical change to address global warming on the other hand. The findings demonstrate that while climate sceptics have so far not been able to use the affordances social media provide to their advantage and generate a significant logic of connective action, the climate strike movement, and Greta Thunberg have been extraordinarily successful, and do hold the potential to shift the climate change discourse. Social media have thus operated as a disruptive mechanism that has changed the distribution of power among actors, and agential mechanisms of ‘winning over’. Changes in societal discourses have resulted from these shifts, which carry the potential to lead to a change in the climate order.
