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Short abstract:

I identify how YouTube creators are producing climate change content by mapping and analysing change in climate change ‘issue spaces’ in the US, India and Philippines. I discuss how the search algorithm disseminates content over time as well as the prominent themes that emerge from the videos.

Long abstract:

Content creators on YouTube have been successful in communicating and engaging millions of people across the globe, shaping narratives and discussions around climate change. YouTube’s algorithmic systems have played a key part, but this has provided the platform the power of governing the visibility of what content users to interact with and consume (Gillespie, 2017). This dissemination of climate change content on YouTube will differ based on different locales and experiences from creators (Weber, 2010), yet significant focus remains on anglosphere perspectives. Therefore, my aim has been to map the ‘climate change space’ on YouTube by investigating how climate change is being distributed and presented globally. Moving away from the ‘snapshot’ exploration of algorithmic systems my methodology draws from Rieder et al., (2018) ‘Ranking Cultures’ approach to take a longitudinal exploration as to how the search results of climate change adjacent queries (Climate Change, Net Zero, Climate Crisis, Climate Justice, and Climate Science) are delivering content to English speaking audiences in the USA, India, and the Philippines over a 6-month period. From this dataset the verbal, visual, and textual content of the most visible videos were then examined to identify how climate change narratives are being built on the platform. From the result, I will discuss how the output of the YouTube search algorithm reacts overtime, while also noting how queries operate in their own issue spaces on the platform. I will also identify what climate narratives are dominant on the platform and the characteristics of visible videos.