Incivility and Contentiousness Spillover between COVID-19 and Climate Science Engagement

2025-02-07

AI Summary

This study investigates how uncivil and adversarial discourse surrounding COVID-19 spilled over into climate change discussions during the pandemic, moderated by political orientation—particularly anti-internationalist populist beliefs. Method: Leveraging large-scale Twitter and Reddit textual data, we applied NLP techniques to detect incivility, topic modeling to identify cross-domain thematic linkages, and event-based time-series analysis to trace dynamic spillover patterns. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence of an affective-polarization-driven adversarial spillover from COVID-19 to climate discourse. This spillover is significantly amplified among anti-internationalist populist users and mediates the association between vaccine hesitancy and climate policy opposition. Findings demonstrate that acute public health crises can exacerbate polarization across scientific domains by activating preexisting political cleavages, thereby intensifying public contestation over evidence-based policymaking.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Adversarial Learning

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Affective polarization and its accompanying cleavage-based sorting drives incivility and contentiousness around climate change and other science-related issues. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with climate change and climate science on Twitter and Reddit. We find strong evidence of the signatures of affective polarization surrounding COVID-19 spilling into the climate change domain. Across different social media systems, COVID-19 content is associated with incivility and contentiousness in climate discussions. These patterns of increased antagonism were responsive to pandemic events that made the link between science and public policy more salient. We also show that the observed spillover activated along pre-pandemic political cleavages, specifically anti-internationalist populist beliefs, that linked climate policy opposition to vaccine hesitancy. Our findings highlight the dangers of entrenched cross-domain polarization manifesting as spillover of antagonistic behavior.

Problem

• spillover of incivility
• COVID-19 to climate science
• affective polarization impact

Innovation

• Cross-domain spillover analysis
• Social media sentiment tracking
• Pandemic-event responsive patterns