Multimodal climate change communication on WeChat: analyzing visual/textual clusters on China’s largest social media platform

Xiaoyue Yan () and Mike S. Schäfer ()
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Xiaoyue Yan: University of Zurich
Mike S. Schäfer: University of Zurich

Climatic Change, 2025, vol. 178, issue 7, No 9, 22 pages

Abstract: Abstract Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges, and China is one of the world’s largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Effective climate change communication is essential for shaping public perception and fostering responses to mitigate climate impacts. This study provides one of the first comprehensive, multimodal analyses of climate change communication on WeChat, China’s largest social media platform. Using computational methods such as topic modeling and hierarchical clustering, we identify distinct clusters in both textual and visual content across 3,565 WeChat articles and 32,327 images, and examine how these elements form multimodal topics. Our results reveal that climate change communication on WeChat predominantly focuses on societal issues, with scientific information visible but less pronounced, and that skepticism and misinformation are notably scarce. There is a strong emphasis on governmental discourse and national policy, particularly China’s carbon reduction strategies, but limited connection to regional, local or individual experiences. The visual representation includes global icons, such as polar bears and glaciers, alongside culturally specific elements like traditional Chinese calligraphy and platform-specific imagery like memes. This research provides insights into multimodal climate change communication in a non-Western context and an important yet underexplored platform.

Keywords: Climate change; Social media; WeChat; Multimodal analysis; Computational methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10584-025-03980-x

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