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 top20, one week top20, two weeks 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Fig 1. Platform’s temporal diversification. Value 1 corresponds to the case where results of the same country- language query obtained at different times are identical. Value 0 corresponds to query results with no common videos. The plot shows the distribution of temporal diversification over country-language queries. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338.g001 material: diversification, language and country). These language clusters matter for the visibil- ity prospects of local channels. As the results in the previous section showed, channels from particular regions dominate the global language clusters. We next consider the contribution from other sides. While the platform certainly con- tributes to keeping the rankings constant, it is also possible that audience preferences con- tribute to sluggish ranking dynamics by persistently favouring particular videos and channels. Given the strength of the language pattern, we continue to organise these results according to language clusters. As Fig 3 shows, there is a clear concentration of preferences for some channel types over others across most language clusters (although not always for the same types). Each value in the boxplot corresponds to the distribution of audience views across channel types in a language (for those with at least five videos in the results). The distribution runs from 0 (equal attention) to 1 (one type receives all attention). This picture holds when

considering comments and likes. The previous section already established that fresh actors beyond the conventional climate communicators do appear in top rankings, but that the sheer presence of fresh channels does not in itself imply a break with conventional content. Here, probing the channel side confirms that some channel types do tend to include arctic themes more than others. However, this is not predictive: it still varies with the context, even in the case of the professional media chan- nels. Moreover, in many cases, several different channel types together manifest the presence of the arctic repertoire at the top. Fig 4 shows the distribution of channel types with arctic PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338 April 8, 2025 15/ 23