Sponsored messaging about climate change on Facebook: Actors, content, frames

TL;DR

This study analyzes how various actors use Facebook ads to frame climate change, revealing differences in messaging strategies, target audiences, and regional focus, providing an initial empirical insight into online climate discourse.

Contribution

It offers the first empirical analysis of climate change advertising on Facebook, highlighting actor differences, framing strategies, and regional variations in messaging.

Findings

Most ad spend targeted US, GB, and CA users.

Political actors dominate US climate ads; NGOs lead in GB.

Different actors emphasize solutions or impacts in their messaging.

Abstract

Online communication about climate change is central to public discourse around this contested issue. Facebook is a dominant social media platform known to be a major source of information and online influence, yet discussion of climate change on the platform has remained largely unstudied due to difficulties in accessing data. This paper utilises Facebook's repository of social/political ads to study how climate change is framed as an issue in adverts placed by different actors. Sponsored content is a strategic investment and presumably intended to be persuasive, so patterns of who pays for adverts and how those adverts frame the issue can reveal large-scale trends in public discourse. We show that most money spent on climate-related messaging is targeted at users in the US, GB and CA. While the number of advert impressions correlates with total spend by an actor, there is a secondary effect of unpaid social sharing which can substantially affect the number of impressions per dollar spent. Most spend in the US is by political actors, while environmental non-governmental organisations dominate spend in GB. Analysis shows that climate change solutions are well represented in GB, while climate change impacts such as extreme weather events are strongly represented in the US and CA. Different actor types frame the issue of climate change in different ways; political actors position the issue as party political and a point of difference between candidates, whereas environmental NGOs frame climate change as the focus of collective action and social mobilisation. Overall, our study provides a first empirical exploration of climate-related advertising on Facebook. It shows the diversity of actors seeking to use Facebook as a platform for their campaigns and how they utilise different topic frames to persuade users to act.