Transformation processes in digital climate communication
How is the digital platform society changing our perception of climate change — and who is shaping public knowledge about it today? This dissertation examines how visual communication practices, new groups of actors, and the use of generative AI are transforming climate communication on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It shows how visibility, authority, and trust are shifting in the interplay of platform logics, multimodal formats, and new communicators — and what this means for the future of science communication and the public handling of knowledge.
The doctoral project “Communicating Climate in the Digital Platform Society: Visual Practices, New Communicators and the Rise of GenAI in Science Communication” examines how communication about climate change is changing on social media and what this means for science communication, the public, and the public handling of knowledge. The focus is on how popular digital platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube affect the visibility and credibility of scientific actors and what new forms of climate communication are emerging as a result.
Social media has fundamentally changed science communication. On the one hand, it offers new opportunities to communicate scientific topics creatively, visually, and directly. On the other hand, their audio-visual formats, fast-paced attention logic, and opaque recommendation algorithms increasingly shape who is heard and how knowledge is communicated. In addition to traditional actors such as researchers and journalists, influencers, activists, and even AI-powered accounts are now emerging as new voices — often with a significant impact on the perception and interpretation of scientific topics. The dissertation examines these changes at different levels of digital science communication. It analyzes how communication practices, actor roles, and technological developments influence each other and what new forms of visibility, authority, and trust emerge as a result. The project combines large-scale analyzes of digital, multimodal content with theoretical reflections on the transformation of the public sphere, mediality, and knowledge in the context of social platforms and generative AI.
The project thus combines theoretical perspectives from medialization, platform, and science research with methods from computational communication science. The aim is to understand the profound transformation of public climate communication in the digital age: from the dominance of text-based media to a visual-emotional, algorithmically structured communication culture in which new actors and technologies are renegotiating the relationship between science, the public, and trust.