Presentation short abstract

What role might social media have in mobilizing values and fostering actions for the environment? The digital age demands new frameworks to better understand grassroots environmental practices within hybrid contexts, where the boundaries between the digital and physical are increasingly fluid.

Presentation long abstract

Digitalization is transforming the ways in which people experience, value and care for nature. Yet, there is still little understanding on how social media content facilitates indirect nature experiences and influences notions of care for nature. We introduce a novel framework to investigate how social media can be a space of both opportunity and risk to mobilize values for environmental stewardship. We propose that social media offers complementary pathways for environmental stewardship by fostering care, knowledge and agency. Yet, the potential is limited by the socio-environmental, political and technological affordances that shape how digital nature interactions are portrayed and made meaningful. We analyze social media posts across three major social media platforms (X/Twitter, YouTube and Weibo) and three major languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin). Our findings show that even though nature appears often in the feed, and in over half of the posts includes an expression of relational value, stewardship action is reported slightly. We identify that aesthetic values dominate in the digital sphere and are less likely to co-occur with stewardship action, whereas values related to stewardship principle and ecological literacy are more likely to co-occur with reported stewardship action. These are valuable insights for the communication strategies of environmental initiatives and individuals and collectives engaged in grassroots practices. By challenging the widespread notion that social media leads only to nature disconnection and a decline in environmental stewardship, we hope to inspire discussions and raise new questions on the role of social media platforms in advancing the socio-ecological transition.