Disentangling the climate divide with emotional patterns: a network-based mindset reconstruction approach

Abstract. Extreme political populism has been fiercely spreading climate disinformation for years, contributing to a social divide about climate change. In order to profile how both sides of the climate divide communicate climate change, we collected dissemination materials and analysed the mindset of key actors reaching global audiences. We apply network science to textual content in order to reconstruct and analyse the mindsets of key actors across the climate divide. Here, we show that the emerging mindsets support the identification of emotional patterns – such as hypercritical scepticism masking falsehoods under a trustful promotion of change – linked to a quick and pervasive spread of falsehoods, i.e. an infodemic. We find that, in climate change disinformation, the word “climate” represents a fearsome threat linked to inconsistent science. We show that the word “change” represents a reassuring pattern in climate disinformation, characterised by trust and by low anticipation without risk awareness, except for some fear about policy changes. For climate activism, the word “change” is linked to high levels of negative emotions like anger, disgust, and fear related to a perception of existential threats. Furthermore, the word “children” represents an angering concern in climate disinformation, while climate change activism perceives “children” with trust and joy but also sadness for their anticipated future. Mindset reconstruction has the potential to become a relevant tool for identifying and flagging communication materials linked to disinformation, which amplifies the climate divide and facilitates infodemics.