“Ecofascism” the language of denigration

“Ecofascism” the language of denigration

#case

June 202Z

Scope

  • Understanding the conflict-driven response to environmental policy in the online public sphere
  • Singling out the focal points of the opposition and differentiating them from discourses simply expressing displeasure regarding environmental policies.

Challenges

  • Understanding and gauging the impact of the various narratives which regard environmental policies as "repressive" or authoritarian
  • Identifying and analysing the derogatory discourse surrounding environmental policies and discourse

Solutions

  • Collecting multiplatform data (Twitter, Reddit) in France and in the USA
  • Identifying clusters of contestation in the content and community discourse through topic mining and semi-supervised audience mining
  • Comparative analysis of the most semantically impactful terms

Results

  • Evaluation of the "radicalisation" and "trollification" of criticism towards environmental policies
  • Analysis of the generalisation of said repressive terms and analysis of their political impact, comparable to that of a "semantic virus"