TL;DR
This paper analyzes climate change discourse on Brazilian YouTube, exploring psychological content traits that drive engagement, their influence on popularity, and the potential for synthetic campaigns, supported by a large annotated dataset.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive dataset of Brazilian YouTube climate content with annotations and investigates persuasive strategies and manipulation risks in digital climate communication.
Findings
Psychological content traits significantly affect audience engagement.
Certain traits correlate with higher content popularity.
The dataset enables future research on digital climate discourse and manipulation.
Abstract
Climate change poses a global threat to public health, food security, and economic stability. Addressing it requires evidence-based policies and a nuanced understanding of how the threat is perceived by the public, particularly within visual social media, where narratives quickly evolve through voices of individuals, politicians, NGOs, and institutions. This study investigates climate-related discourse on YouTube within the Brazilian context, a geopolitically significant nation in global environmental negotiations. Through three case studies, we examine (1) which psychological content traits most effectively drive audience engagement, (2) the extent to which these traits influence content popularity, and (3) whether such insights can inform the design of persuasive synthetic campaigns--such as climate denialism--using recent generative language models. Another contribution of this work…
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