Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have millions of users logging in every day, using these platforms for commu nication, entertainment, and news consumption. These platforms adopt rules that determine how users communicate and thereby limit and shape public discourse.2 Platforms need to deal with large amounts of data generated every day. For example, as of October 2021, 4.55 billion social media users were ac tive on an average number of 6.7 platforms used each month per internet user.3 As a result, platforms were compelled to develop governance models and content moderation systems to deal with harmful and undesirable content, including disinformation. In this study: • ‘Content governance’ is defined as a set of processes, procedures, and systems that determine how a given platform plans, publishes, moder ates, and curates content. • ‘Content moderation’ is the organised practice of a social media plat form of pre-screening, removing, or labelling undesirable content to reduce the damage that inappropriate content can cause.
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The day comes to an end. Tired of abiding to the rules of productivity you sit back, relax and prepare yourself for some hours of dolce fare niente on your social network of choice – you log into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and are now ready to catch up with your friends, acquaintances, family et al. An advertisement for something vaguely familiar steals your attention. And then another one. You install AdBlock but still are bombarded with friendly requests to vote on some contest which requires you to like some company's page in order to proceed, or with delicious instafood from the fast food chain down your street. Oh wait, what is this? ‘23 surprising ways M&M's make your sex life better’? What fresh hell is this? Why do you find yourself unable to relax, exhausted from all the stimulus, feeling pushed from one hyperlink to the other as if a sudden gush of digital wind unearthed you from the comfort of your sofa?
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Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees ofseparation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies).Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should beaddressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitativestudies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter.We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on sciencecommunication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate changeand its future role in social life.
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