Visual digital intermediaries and global climate communication: Is climate change still a distant problem on YouTube?

PLOS ONE OPEN ACCESS Citation: Segerberg A, Magnani M (2025) Visual digital intermediaries and global climate communication: Is climate change still a distant problem on YouTube?. PLoS ONE 20(4): e0318338. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone. 0318338 Editor: Andrea Tomassi, Uninettuno International Telematic University, ITALY Received: March 11, 2024 Accepted: January 13, 2025 Published: April 8, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Segerberg, Magnani. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: All files needed to replicate the results of the study are available from the Open Science Framework, URL: https://osf.io/gmb7n/ Funding: AS: Swedish Research Council grant 2015-01835. https://vr.se AS, MM: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE) grant 2021-01646. https://forte.se, under the CHANSE ERA-NET Co-fund programme, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon RESEARCH ARTICLE Visual digital intermediaries and global climate communication: Is climate change still a distant problem on YouTube? Alexandra Segerberg1∗, Matteo Magnani 2 1 Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden„ 2 InfoLab, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden ∗ alexandra.segerberg@statsvet.uu.se Abstract This article addresses the role of digital intermediaries in visual climate communication,

and specifically their contribution to the persistence of a ‘green ghetto’ of traditional com- municators and repertoires online. We argue for a comparative sensibility: global plat- forms convey global issues to global audiences, yet the same platform may distribute conditions of visibility for compelling communication unevenly around the world. The study analyses how a major global visual platform, YouTube (Search), articulates climate change in 232 countries in their official languages. It combines API research, channel coding and computational image analysis to assess the processing and presentation of top-ranked results with respect to their diversity and proximity to local context. The find- ings show that YouTube Search establishes visibility winners who typically sustain the classic visual repertoire of climate change as a distant problem, and that Global North sources dominate irrespective of region. However, there are notable exceptions to these patterns. 1 Introduction It is notoriously challenging to engage citizens on climate change, an issue that is often per- ceived as abstract and remote in time and place. Strategic recommendations therefore encour- age making climate narratives relevant by bringing them close to people’s experience and spheres of concern [1–4]. The recommendations are well known, but observers still note an ingrained ‘green ghetto’ [[2] ch. 6] in communication on climate change, in which a delim- ited circle of much the same (Global North) speakers, stories, and styles dominate and rein-

force the notion of climate change as a distant problem. The primary problem with the green ghetto from the perspective of citizen engagement is not in the first instance what is said about climate change, but how it is said, by whom, and the relation to the audience. There have been expectations that digital media would dissolve the green ghetto, by sup- porting fresh voices from beyond the circle of ‘usual suspects’ who might bring repertoires that resonate with local audiences [5–7]. After all, contemporary complex media ecologies PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338 April 8, 2025 1/ 23