Understanding climate-related visual storytelling on TikTok

A cross-national multimodal analysis

Abstract

This cross-cultural study investigates the prevalence and impact of climate-related campaigns on TikTok, with a specific focus on climate-related visual storytelling in Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Computational methods are employed in the study to analyse a dataset of 7,564 videos, providing insights into prominent visual characteristics and regional variations. The findings underline the significance of cultural and political contexts in shaping climate storytelling on TikTok. Furthermore, this research explores the potential of computational visual data analysis in studying climate communication, demonstrating the integration of computer vision and topic modelling to examine visual styles and communicative functions in TikTok’s climate storytelling. The study enhances our understanding of climate communication on digital platforms and emphasizes the value of leveraging computational methods to gain meaningful cross-cultural insights into visual storytelling in the context of climate change.