In recent years climate activism has seen a resurgence of physical forms of protests. From the public marches of Fridays for Future to the more extreme forms of disobedience of extinction rebellion, more and more the physical bodies of the activists have regained the centre of the public discourse around climate change and climate policies. While the existing dynamic between physical protest and mass media’s agenda is well-known, it is less clear what if the trajectory of visual representation of physical protest once it is shared on online social media platforms. Will this content remain within the homophilic part of the network that supports actions for climate of will it reach parts of the network that are ideologically diverse? This presentation will adopt a combination of computational methods to answer this question for facebook data. The results show how a small fraction of the content representing physical protest is actually able to reach parts of the network that are ideologically different from the activist pages that initially shared the content. Nevertheless moving away from the homophilic part of the networks means that the reaction generated by this content shifts from support to neutrality if not open hostility. 

Bio:

Luca Rossi is associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen where he teaches Digital Data Analysis and Network Society and where he coordinates the activities of the Human-Centred Data Science research group. His research focuses on understanding collective and information dynamic through the use of social media data and computational methods.