Climate movements and their counter-mobilisation in the digital world

Climate movements have, especially since the Corona-19 pandemic, become hybrid and have combined its off-line climate strikes with a significant wave of online activism. Even their countermovement has likely done the same. Therefore, this paper aims to look at how the climate movement-countermovement dynamics function in the online sphere. We focus on the European and Swedish movements, their online networks and interaction via various social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook). The analysis will focus on movement-countermovement reactions to each other’s verbal and visual messages that relate to several COP meetings (e.g., COP25-COP27). The typical examples of the climate movement are Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and more formal groups like the Swedish Naturskyddsföreningen, while the countermovement often consists of various radical right networks or Swedish groups like the Klimatupplysningen. Our event-centred approach allows having a longer-term focus on the movement-countermovement dynamics. Prior studies have argued that countermovements increase their mobilisation efforts at times when they perceive that the movement is likely to achieve some of their goals, when the movement has expanded its mobilisation capacity (e.g., by gaining more resources or members) or when countermovement has gained some new organisational capacity in terms of members or resources. We test if similar patterns also apply to the climate movement - countermovement interaction, particularly how the verbal and visual dynamics of interaction change: whether the discursive and visual struggle have changed over time. It can be expected that the arguments and photos or images used by both sides become more “polarised” or “contentious” closer to the COP-meetings.