Climate elites rarely tweet across borders—study of 904 actors finds

A new working paper from 23 researchers analyzed the Twitter activity of 904 climate policy actors across nine countries from 2017 to 2022, amassing 40 million tweets from 16,086 accounts. The study, posted on arXiv, treats these actors as a polycentric governance system, examining how boundary blurring between public and private spheres on social media shapes online policy processes. The dataset covers multiple organizational levels—from government agencies and NGOs to individual activists—providing a rare cross-national view of climate discourse.

Key findings reveal that national policy systems rarely interact directly across borders. Instead, they are connected through shared engagement with content produced by international organizations, climate activists, and researchers. Despite significant temporal and cross-national variation in prominence, all national systems responded similarly to major climate events such as protests. This suggests that while elites operate in national silos, global intermediaries serve as the connective tissue of climate policy conversations online.