Who views what from whom? Social media exposure and the Chinese public's risk perceptions of climate change.

Abstract

The Chinese public is increasingly experiencing the local impacts of climate change, whereas the government downplays its domestic effects and critical opinions on environmental governance. As climate change perceptions are crucial for individual risk management, adaptation, and collective climate actions, it is vital to explore how these perceptions are shaped. Given the increasing significance of social media in climate change discourse, this study employs survey data from the 2021 Environmental Risk Perceptions and Environmental Behaviors of Urban Residents Project to investigate how social media exposure influences risk perceptions of climate change among the Chinese public. Drawing on the social amplification of risk framework, this study examines the effect of exposure to environmental information, exposure to opinion diversity, individuals' social media network ties to environmental opinion leaders, and the interaction between social media exposure and cultural values. The results indicate that in the contexts where climate change is neither politically divisive nor openly debated, social media exposure to diverse opinions and social media network ties to environmental scholars positively predict risk perceptions. Additionally, egalitarianism and fatalism are found to moderate the effect of these connections with environmental scholars. This study extends previous research, which focuses largely on the association between the frequency of social media exposure and risk perceptions of climate change, by revealing a more comprehensive and nuanced process that links social media exposure to climate change perceptions.