Having fun saving the climate

Abstract

“How dare you!” was Greta Thunberg’s angry address at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019 and she epitomized the younger generations emotionally charged critique of the political establishment and their lack of efforts to solve the climate crisis. Likewise, recent studies on climate change communication, on the social media platform TikTok, have revealed how Generation Z critique the ‘boomers’ for not preventing the climate crisis (Zeng and Abidin 2021) or express climate anxiety, and helplessness (Kaye et al 2023). Expressions of emotion are in many ways central to how climate change is being addressed on social media, and extant research has so far focussed primarily on quantitative content analysis of affective publics with hashtags on TikTok such as #forclimate (Hautea et al 2021), #climatechange (Corey et al 2022) and #ecotok (Huber et al. 2022). Less attention has been given to how individual influencers address climate change with an emotional focus (Murphy 2021). This article aims to remedy this lack with an analysis of two climate influencers on TikTok, and how they address climate change with messages of fashion and science respectively. They are using their personas (Marshall et al, 2020) to engage in emotional storytelling (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019) and emotional labour (Senft 2008) as well as using hashtags as part of an affective public (Papacharissi 2016). These two types of influencers both communicate upbeat and fact-based climate narratives in contrast to the ‘gloom and doom’-videos shared on TikTok (Hautea et al. 2021; Kaye et al. 2023), however they also represent an individual take on counter-narratives to misinformation about climate change (van Eerten et al. 2017). The analysis exemplifies, how we, in a qualitative study, can investigate how climate influencers with their emotional address as well as their fact-based communication contribute with counter-narratives about climate change on TikTok.