From Disruptive Protests to Disrupted Networks? Analyzing Levels of Polarization in the German Twitter/X Debates on “Fridays for Future” and “Letzte Generation”

Abstract

Examining how different forms of climate protest affect social media debates is critical to understanding their role within societal climate policy discourse. This study compares debates surrounding disruptive and non-disruptive movements on Twitter/X, asking to what extent they lead to ideologically and affectively polarized networks. We analyzed debates around two prominent German climate movements—Fridays for Future and Last Generation—using automated content and network analyses ( N = ~5,000,000) and manual content analyses ( N = 2,830) of data compiled during 2022 and 2023. In doing so, we identified the types of events, (extreme) frames, users, and interactions that shape the structure of the online debates. The results reveal polarized networks in both debates, with the climate protesters’ antagonists driving discursive polarization. The Last Generation debate, however, has a significantly higher number of antagonistic users, more extreme frames, more toxic cross-group interactions, and less diverse network clusters. Last Generation generated higher individual user engagement, suggesting that debates about disruptive protests are effective at attracting attention, albeit at the cost of distracting from climate policy and expanding antagonistic networks. This debate was more polarized than that around Fridays for Future, dividing users into opposing camps, with fewer political and journalistic actors being on the protesters’ side. Thus, the disruptive protests unleashed two types of connective action: a supportive network that defended the protesters and their goals more extensively than during non-disruptive protests, and an antagonistic backlash network driven by what we term “connective counteraction.”