“Breaking the News” To What Extent and How Do Online Protest News Clips Affect Citizens’ Attitudes About Disruptive Climate Protest

Over the past few years, climate activists have increasingly resorted to the use of disruptive action as a strategy to demand urgent climate policy changes, drawing widespread attention to their cause. Scholars have argued that disruptive action can be a vital tool for activists to gain large-scale media attention, thus spreading the word of a social movement organisation (SMO) amongst a large audience of potential sympathisers. At the same time, disruptive, or even violent, protests also run the risk of scaring off potential supporters and negatively impacting an SMO’s reputation. This paper uses the case of climate protest to test the impact of different strategic kinds of climate protest on citizens’ protest attitudes. It relies on a pre-registered vignette survey experiment (N=1.963) in which participants are exposed to manipulated news clips showing different levels of protest disruption and violence across three experimental conditions (peaceful climate protest, non-violent disruptive climate protest and violent disruptive climate protest). We find that online news clips depicting disruptive climate activism have a negative impact on citizens’ protest attitudes, thus lowering an SMO’s chances of gaining public support. Online news clips showing violent disruptive protest have an even stronger negative impact of citizens’ protest attitudes, resulting in a backlash effect that turns people away from an SMO and its goals.