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 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Fig 3. Users’ engagement diversification. Value 0 indicates no diversification, that is, all channel types returned by queries in a given language obtain the same attention expressed in terms of views. Value 1 indicates that one channel type receives all the views for a given language. The plot shows the distribution of engagement diversification over languages. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338.g003 types contribute more than others to the prominence of arctic themes, but the respective sets of top-ranked results are too small to draw conclusions. Finally, intriguingly, exploratory analysis suggests that the presence of arctic themes seems to intensify at the top. We extended beyond the original research design outlined earlier to analyse top and extended rankings using the Resnet50 pre-trained classifier from the pytorch Python package. The results indicate that polar bear prevalence roughly doubles in top 50 results as compared to top 400 results, across differently profiled contexts such as US/English, France/French, Germany/German, and Portugal/Portuguese. This analysis can only be sug- gestive, since only a selection of videos was classified and our tests show that the pre-trained classifier scored low in recall for the polar bear theme. Nevertheless, it does raise the tantalis- ing possibility that this classic visual climate repertoire correlates with video rank prominence (see supplementary material: top-ranked results, trends in arctic content).

6 Discussion This study addresses the role of digital intermediaries in online climate discourse in light of the green ghetto. To investigate the expectation that a delimited circle of speakers, stories and styles would become less predominant, it is not enough to consider what climate communi- cators post. We contend that the role of digital intermediaries requires dedicated attention, and argue for adopting a comparative sensibility. To this end, we analysed how a major global visual platform, YouTube Search, articulates climate change to audiences across the world. The PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338 April 8, 2025 17/ 23