Discourse competition and fragmented echoes: A computational frame analysis of climate change debate on Platform X

Climate change communication is often framed as a contest between scientific knowledge and skepticism, but this binary overlooks fragmentation within the broader climate-concerned public. Drawing on cultural cognition theory, this study examines how competing discourse frames organize climate change debate on Twitter/X. A total of 556,470 English-language tweets posted between July 2014 and April 2024 were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Analysis of Topic Model Networks, supplemented with manual validation. The analysis identifies six discourse frames, dominated by Action & Responsibility, Political Process & Policy, Scientific Evidence & Impact, and Skepticism & Counter-Narrative. The findings show that skepticism consitutes a cohesive but minority discourse, while substantial fragmentation also separates scientific, activist, and policy-oriented communication. Scientific evidence remains weakly integrated into both mobilizational and institutional discourse, and grassroots activism is structurally separated from policy discussion. These patterns recast climate communication as a problem of coordination and cultural translation across “discourse islands,” rather than simply one of correcting misinformation or increasing the supply of scientific facts.