Affordances-in-Practice: How Social Norm Dynamics in Climate Change Publics Are Shaped on Instagram and Twitter

Abstract

Social norms are flexible regulating forces of human behavior. They are shaped by humans, whose actions in turn are shaped by their environment, including the online social spaces they venture into. The objective of this research is to create an understanding of how the affordances of social media platforms shape social norm dynamics in online publics, particularly in climate change publics. For this purpose, we make a comparative analysis of the practices of users on Instagram and Twitter that engage with climate change content. We conducted 22 in-depth interviews with a purposively selected sample of worldwide Twitter and Instagram users. We investigated how each platform’s specific affordances shape the participants’ sense of community and how they participate in social norm enforcement and contestation, also called “callouts.” This “affordances-in-practice” perspective brings observations on the differences in how users can actualize the novel affordances of “interventionability” and “external visibility” on both platforms. This research provides a deeper insight into the socio-technical processes underlying the (self-)organization of social movements and provides a pathway to investigating discursive practices of online publics on other platforms. The study avoids debating which norms should prevail over others in the online climate discussion, but does reflect on the negative impact that certain outcomes of norm enforcement and contestation might have on democratic deliberation on climate change. The main findings are that actualizing these affordances on Twitter anno 2023 makes climate discourse sensitive to group-loyalties, whereas on Instagram it makes it dependent on norm leaders in the form of content creators.