Twitch as a privileged locus to analyze young people’s attitudes in the climate change debate: a quantitative analysis

Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly important venue for public debate. Twitch, in particular, is a popular streaming platform that targets young adults. Originally created for online video game players, the platform also includes other types of content, such as politics, leisure, and science. Here, we present a study that examines climate change discourse on this understudied platform. Unlike previous studies, this work does not only focus on users’ reactions to streamer discourse but, using an ad-hoc methodology, also analyzes the content of the videos. Indeed, an added value of this research is the development of an objective evaluation based on automatic speech recognition (ASP) and natural language processing (NLP). We found that Twitch is an emergent locus for climate discussion with a thriving community of young users interested in the topic. Our findings challenge the understanding of social media discourse on climate change and suggest that platform architecture and intended commercial goals do not play a decisive role in shaping the topics circulating on them. In contrast, our findings support the idea that public discussion on climate change percolates through technology. In other words, the public debate finds its way across existing channels rather than being constrained by them. The research also contributes to the literature by expanding the empirical base for the study of online communication about climate change, especially among young audiences.