An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media: Reproduction Guide

Ani V. Ter-Mkrtchyan & Marshall A. Taylor

This repository contains all R code necessary to reproduce the analysis in "An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media," forthcoming in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sectory Quarterly.

There are some data files you'll need that are too large to store on GitHub. Access the dehydrated tweet IDs and associated topic model probabilities here and the list of pre-computed topic model outputs (for the diagnostic plot) here. Both files should be put in the data/ subfolder.

Abstract: This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of over 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for over a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.