The rise of #climateaction in the time of the FridaysForFuture movement: A semantic network analysis.

We investigate the psycho-linguistic features of the online discourse over climate change, focusing on its modifications throughout the years 2017–2019 as a result of collective actions emerging and spreading worldwide. We seek to understand the emerging connection between digital activism and the psychological processes related to its social drives. To this end, a semantic network is derived from the social platform Twitter, and its evolution is traced over time, tracking textual proxies of social identity and empowerment. Original proposals are made to identify communities and highlight the most important semantic contents of the corpus from a network perspective. These evaluations on semantic communities of related concepts further detail the shift in the rhetoric of collective actions. Finally, we explore projection of the ingroup to the future in the online discourse about climate change, which can point to developments of pro-environmental campaigns. • We have recently experienced a steady increase of collective engagement for climate. • Ranking and community detection uncover the key elements of the online discourse around climate change. • Climate activism is fostered by social drives common to general collective protest. • Affiliation and empowerment characterize the calling to action for climate. • Ingroup mobilization toward the future is specific to 2019 climate activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]