Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Grounded in strategic communication theories, this study investigates the use of compassion as content elements in more than 13,000 Facebook posts by American environmental NGOs in one year using computational techniques. Its findings show that environmental NGOs have adopted compassion both for humans and nature in their social media posts. Of the four compassion components (e.g. awareness, affective, wish, and action that represent four dimensions of the concept including cognitive, affective, intentional, and motivational), awareness was used most frequently. Attention to climate change, an organization-level factor, and natural hazard risks, a state-level variable, were significant predictors of the adoption of compassion in NGOs’ messages. Results offer insights into understanding environmental NGOs’ social media advocacy campaigns, in the context of increasingly discernible climate impacts and the emerging discourse on climate justice.
Wu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.