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Language and Dialogue: Online-First Articles

Environmental discourse on social media

Exploring engagement in X/Twitter for environmental purposes

 | University of Zaragoza
The multifaceted character of environmental discourse becomes evident on social media, where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) engage in public environmental discourses. Focused on X/Twitter for environmental purposes, this paper investigates engagement as an interpersonal phenomenon comprising two dimensions: self-presentation and audience projection. It qualitatively and quantitatively analyses 100 X/Twitter posts from WWF and Greenpeace (50 per account) with the tool NVivo 14. Findings reveal how the NGOs rely on verbal (self-mentions, lexical items) and non-verbal resources (emoji and multimedia elements) to present themselves to their audience, whilst exploiting verbal resources (second-person pronouns and directives) to construct their audience. Results underscore how NGOs leverage X/Twitter to assert their own legitimacy and that of their audience as integral members of the environmentalist community.
Keywords: engagement, interpersonality, social media, Twitter, X
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Social media engagement
  • 2.Corpus and methods
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Methods and methodological framework
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Self-presentation of environmental organisations on X/Twitter
    • 3.2Audience projection in X/Twitter for environmental purposes
  • 4.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 7 January 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00189.san
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