In an era increasingly reliant on social media and increasingly more concerned with the effects of climate change, NC State Assistant Professor Bill Rand set out to see if there is a connection between extreme weather events and how they are discussed on social media.
Rand, an assistant professor of marketing in the Poole College of Management, published a paper discussing how extreme weather events affect the discussion of climate change on social media.
Along with an international team of collaborators, Rand assessed Twitter data about three recent extreme weather events: Hurricane Irene (2011), Hurricane Sandy (2012) and Winter Storm Jonas (2016).
Rand began collecting data for the project in 2011 during Hurricane Irene. Rand said he was approached by Nicholas Roxburgh, who at the time was a student at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, and was asked to join the project for his expertise in social media conversations. He worked providing data for both Hurricane Irene and Winter Storm Jonas. Roxburgh received a grant to purchase the data for Hurricane Sandy.
“I’ve been studying social media conversations for 10 years and pretty much since the advent of Twitter,” Rand said. “Because of this, I worked with [Roxburgh] through the perspective of tracing how climate change conversations happen on social media.”
Rand’s findings showed that discussions of climate change on Twitter depended on two major aspects, the first being the timing of the event. He found that social and political occurrences at the time of the weather event influenced the surrounding conversations.
“Hurricane Sandy, for instance, happened right during the 2012 presidential elections,” Rand said. “This meant that a lot of the climate change discussion on Twitter had a political twinge to it.”
Rand found that the type of weather event occurring was also influential in the discussion of climate change.
“When Snowstorm Jonas happened, a lot of people didn’t think of it as something that was related to climate change,” Rand said. “For some reason, people don’t think of snow as being related to climate change and are more likely to acknowledge hurricanes as a product of climate change, rather than a severe snowstorm.”
Rand said that his aim is to give scientists more insight into strategies of circulating scientific research to the public. From this research, he hopes that scientists learn that they must alter how they discuss climate change depending on weather events in order for the public to listen.
“I’m hoping that people will understand from looking at this paper that because of the different descriptions we have over time, you can’t really use the exact same framing of a conversation to disseminate knowledge every time,” Rand said. “If a climate change scientist is interested in getting their knowledge out on social media, they need to adapt to the way conversations about climate change are happening at that time.”
Jean Goodwin, a professor of communication in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, agreed that social media has become a large platform for the circulation of scientific knowledge to the public. She discussed her belief that tailoring a message to the framework of the time is the most effective way of expanding a message.
“There’s a lot of evidence that social media is the way that people are getting information of all kinds, not just science information,” Goodwin said. “That’s probably going to expand. I think it’s worthwhile to remember that we are better able to promote progress if we understand that everybody looks at the issue from their own personal framework.”
Rand is hopeful for the future of social media and its ability to act as an area for the distribution of knowledge. He hopes that future research in this area will lead to more effective conversations about a diversity of topics.
“I really am a firm believer that we’re in kind of a first stage of understanding social media conversations,” Rand said. “We need to understand how people are having those conversations.”
