Date of publication
Dec 16, 2024
Category:
Article
(Un)certainty in science and climate change: a longitudinal analysis (2014–2022) of narratives about climate science on social media in Brazil (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter)
by
Roberta Lima
,
Andre L. Belem
,
Diógenes Lycarião
,
Thaiane Oliveira
,
Simone Evangelista
,
Luisa Massarani
,
Marcelo Alves
This article examines climate change discourse on Brazilian social media from 2014 to 2022 and use a longitudinal approach, analyzing discourse, scientific authority, and eco-emotions on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Methods include TF-IDF for feature extraction, sentiment analysis with VADER, and Named Entity Recognition (NER). A Ridge Classifier was trained on 557 manually classified samples. Findings show no significant increase in challenges to scientific authority or skepticism, but reveal a subtle shift towards using uncertainty as a rhetorical tool to undermine trust in scientific discourse.