Visualising Inequality: Cross‑National Differences in Digital Climate‑Justice Communication

Digital technologies are frequently celebrated for their democratising potential, particularly their capacity to amplify marginalised voices, lower participation barriers, and facilitate transnational mobilisation. Yet, the same infrastructures that enable connective action also reproduce entrenched inequalities, shaping who becomes visible, who is heard, and whose claims resonate. This paper examines how such layered inequalities materialise within contemporary digital activism by analysing the interplay between platform architectures, governance regimes, and national sociopolitical contexts. Moving beyond access‑based explanations, the study foregrounds how inequality, especially in relation to the Global South, is represented or amplified in digital climate‑justice communication. The paper employs a comparative mixed‑methods design to investigate the visual and discursive representation of inequality in the Instagram communication of Fridays For Future (FFF) in Italy, Germany, and Sweden between 2019 and 2024. A co‑hashtag network analysis identifies posts referencing COP events and maps thematic connections to inequality, the Global South, and MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas). A qualitative visual analysis of selected posts further examines how these themes are articulated through imagery and visual framing. Preliminary findings reveal marked cross‑national differences. Italy produces the largest volume of relevant content (N = 225), followed by Germany (N = 108) and Sweden (N = 15). These disparities correspond to the richness of each country’s hashtag networks: while Germany and Sweden focus primarily on event‑specific messaging, Italy adopts a more diversified communicative repertoire. Shared clusters include movement identifiers (e.g., FridaysForFuture, Klimastreik, GlobalStrike) and core climate‑justice demands (e.g., EndFossilFuels, UprootTheSystem, PeopleNotProfit). Germany places a stronger emphasis on democratic accountability, addressing political leaders and institutions directly. Notably, explicit references to Global South injustices or Indigenous struggles are largely absent in the German and Swedish cases, despite the use of generic climate‑justice hashtags. Italy, by contrast, integrates a broader set of themes, including decolonisation, human rights, social inequality, and solidarity. Visually, these dynamics are expressed through two dominant strategies: images of mass mobilisation, central to FFF’s global identity, and the use of memes to translate COP‑related debates into platform‑appropriate, youth‑oriented formats. Across cases, three structural dynamics emerge. First, platform design and algorithmic curation privilege specific communicative styles and identities, producing uneven amplification that disadvantages minority and contentious actors. Second, activists’ capacity to mobilise attention is shaped by broader political‑economic conditions that disproportionately affect communities in the Global South and marginalised groups in the Global North. Third, activists adopt creative strategies to navigate exclusion, such as multimodal storytelling; yet these strategies require resources and digital literacies that remain unevenly distributed. Overall, the study demonstrates that digital activism is not a neutral amplifier but a selective system of visibility and erasure. The uneven representation of Global South injustices across European FFF chapters highlights persistent asymmetries in transnational climate discourse.