ABSTRACT
Social media platforms have been widely available for over 10 years, and communication research has responded in part by exploring how Facebook and other social media sites are used for advocacy and public discourse. Environmental issues, including climate change, have also been the focus of recent work on social media, including Environmental Communication's 2015 special issue on Climate Change Communication and the Internet. Bruno Latour's actor-network theory allows people to account for the roles played by users, links, hashtags, and other actants in the effort to move information through a larger network. The high percentage of tweets in the dataset that included hyperlinks shows that these links clearly functioned as key elements for consumers and sharers of the news event in question. Despite being non-human technologies, these hyperlinks are themselves important actors in the network of science communication, in both their facets, of text and technology.
