Author: Leonor Solis – Ecosystems and Sustainability Research Institute, UNAM, Mexico and Universidad de Navarra, Spain. Mexico

Understand how social media platforms are transforming science-society relations, and how they interact with news media and audiences to communicate relevant scientific issues such as Climate Change (CC), represents one of the main challenges of Science Communication research nowadays. Social Media research on CC has focused mainly on text analysis within the Twitter platform, and CC visual communication studies have mostly analyzed still images from news media. However, there are still gaps in the existing literature about the role played by audiovisual materials such as native videos on Facebook , the platforms with the largest audiences or growth worldwide. The aim of this study is to: (1) analyze how climate change is represented by Facebook native news-videos (2) compare the visual representations with those previously studied in print and television. Through a quantitative content analysis of a sample of legacy and new media facebook native videos. Results show that social video news, present innovative themes, frames and visual formats to communicate climate change, to reach audiences. Social-news-videos present new visual proposals and a more correlate discourse and image than the ones used by TV and press media. But still they maintain a catastrophic discourse, consecuences and activist frames and visuals, that correlates with the shareability of the content from a clickbait perspective, they are effective to hook new audiences. Findings are expected to contribute further theoretical and methodological approaches for future research of social media by integrating analysis of discourse and visual content on relevant issues concerning science communication.

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Presentation type: Insight talk
Theme: Transformation