Communication on the environmental topics in Ukrainian Facebook on the example of Greta Tunberg's speech discussion

Abstract

The speech of sixteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg to the UN on September 23, 2019, caused a wave of discussion among Ukrainian social networks users. This triggered a variety of messages, in particular it has updated ecology issues that are weakly discussed in the domestic information space. This case gave us an opportunity to identify differences in the attitude of different categories of Facebook users to environmental issues. Using content analysis and discourse analysis of posts on Facebook, we have identified the following patterns. This topic outlined the gender difference in reactions and pervasive messages much more than the political issues. Women mostly tended to be positive about both Greta Tunberg's personality and environmental issues in general (48% and 83% respectively for women versus 34% and 70% for men respectively). In addition, typical «masculine» and «feminine» messages were noticed, for example, men were more likely to use scientific or pseudoscientific theorizings about ecology, to allow themselves jokes about the appearance of Greta than women did. In addition, users who talk about market reforms, the land market, the digitization of public services, etc., are more likely to support climate change activism than people who are concerned about prices, tariffs, pensions and so on. Active supporters of the patriotic agenda on Facebook are much more positive about ecology activism than the average network user.