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Frames and Their Affective Dimensions: A Case Study of Climate Change News Articles

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Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (SBP-BRiMS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13558))

Abstract

News articles shared on social media platforms could be framed in ways such that specific points are emphasized or de-emphasized to create confusion on scientific facts. In this work, we use policy frames suggested by Boydstun et al., 2014 to find frames used in over 810k climate change news articles shared on Twitter by news agencies. Moreover, we present a method to find affective dimensions, namely Evaluation (good vs. bad), Potency (strong vs. weak), and Activity (active vs. passive), of the frames. Our results suggest that news articles about climate change are predominantly framed as related to policy issues in the context of a social group’s traditions, customs, or values. We also conclude that frames are not reshared based on their affect. Lastly, we present implications for the increasingly relevant climate change communication research.

This work was supported in part by the Knight Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS), and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy of Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Knight Foundation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a more detailed discussion on related work and data collection, refer Tyagi [29].

  2. 2.

    Due to Tweet/user account deletion, we use 700k articles for our average reshare analysis.

  3. 3.

    Refer https://github.com/amantyag/Framing_Affective_Dimensions for details.

  4. 4.

    Refer to Tyagi [29] for details on EPA scores for each month.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Aman Tyagi & Kathleen M. Carley

  2. Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Kenneth Joseph

  3. Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Kathleen M. Carley

Authors
  1. Aman Tyagi
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  2. Kenneth Joseph
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  3. Kathleen M. Carley
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Correspondence to Aman Tyagi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Army Cyber Institute, West Point, NY, USA

    Robert Thomson

  2. Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, PA, USA

    Christopher Dancy

  3. United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

    Aryn Pyke

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Tyagi, A., Joseph, K., Carley, K.M. (2022). Frames and Their Affective Dimensions: A Case Study of Climate Change News Articles. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Pyke, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13558. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_6

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