Suchergebnisse

To what extent was Greta Thunberg a 'polarizing figure' on Facebook, in the period when she received the most extensive media attention? The paper analyses seven months of discussion concerning Thunberg and her message of intergenerational climate justice, using all relevant posts on public Facebook pages in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. We find that there are many similarities in the attitudes expressed and topics discussed on Facebook in the three countries; however, there are also some striking differences in the levels of polarisation. This comparative study provides evidence that the level of polarisation around these topics on Facebook is very low in Sweden and the UK, but high in Germany. In Germany, a group of political actors stand out as particularly polarising, and, in contrast to the other two countries, the topic of intergeneration justice, the core of Thunberg's message, is almost absent from the German Facebook discourse. The study shows that Thunberg was not in general a polarising figure in the three European countries and that neither the affordances offered by the platform nor features of her person, message, or activism explain the observed polarisation around Thunberg on Facebook.

Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.