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

PLOS ONE Visual digital intermediaries and global climate communication as Global North/South. Recall that the data is collected through the Search API with no per- sonalisation: individual YouTube users may see different results, which is not what we assess in this study. The top results evince different profiles, and channel types behave differently across contexts. We here therefore present the results according to language groups. The English-language queries, as the largest cluster, follow the aggregate profile. As Table 2 shows, the top-ranked results concentrate to a small number of channels. ‘Climate change’ is primarily defined by professional media and user-led channels, and to some extent also popu- lar science groups. The top-20 channels tend not to be local: channels from only 14 countries are represented in the 79 English-language searches, and we note a clear dominance from the US and UK. Almost one third of the top-ranked videos include arctic distancing themes. Beyond English, the results in the language groups span a spectrum of profile types. Top results in French and Japanese distribute relatively evenly across channel types. At the other extreme, Arabic and German render climate change as an issue highly defined by one type of channel. In these examples, the channel type in focus is professional media, but this is not always the case in concentrated profiles. For example, in other (smaller) languages with concentrated profiles, (e.g. Turkmen, Zulu) user-led channels dominate (see supplementary material: top-ranked results).

Among the globally spoken languages, sources based in Europe often dominate. In the French cluster, the top-ranked videos are almost all posted by French (and some Belgian and Swiss) channels. This means that top-ranked results, which have a relatively high prevalence of arctic content (38%), are not local to other regions that get these results, such as, Canada, Cameroon, and Haiti. In the Spanish language cluster, which has levels of arctic content more akin to English (27%), channel sources spread between Spain and Latin America. Neverthe- less, Spain contributes the most channels. This is twice that of Mexico, despite Mexico being the biggest YouTube market in the cluster. By contrast, large markets with their own language have a larger portion of local chan- nels at the top. Japanese, German, Hindi and Indonesian queries (almost) exclusively present sources with local connection. Russia is an exception, with only half the videos stemming from Russian channels and the others from a range of eight countries. There is also a different pattern for Hindi and India/English: the former strongly features online education channels and channels with local connection, the latter aligns with the English cluster pattern of skew- ing towards media, user-led, and popular science channels, and only three are local. Still, in all of these languages — large markets but small YouTube languages — the arctic themes persist in up to one third of the videos (from Indonesian at 20%, German 22%, Japanese and Hindi at

25%, to Russian at 29%). For the Arabic cluster, in which most top channels are regional news media or localised versions of global broadcasters such as BBC, Deutsche Welle, and France 24, arctic themed content sits at 30%. The real standout is Portuguese. This is the only global language cluster in which reference to climate change as a distant problem via the arctic theme is virtually absent. Only one video, an animated infomercial posted by a No Description channel, depicts an arctic theme. This is also the only cluster dominated by channels local to a single Global South country, Brazil. The issue is articulated through a highly distributed set of channel types that inverts the oth- erwise typical profile: (inter)governmental and civil society channels are prominent, explicitly user-led channels less so, and professional media presence is limited to one single video. 5.2 Conditions of visibility: Ranking assemblages across contexts We now dig into the conditions of visibility underpinning the top-ranked results and how they contribute to sustaining or dissolving the green ghetto: What characterises ranking PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338 April 8, 2025 12/ 23