Visual Framing and Politicization of Climate Change: The Case of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion in Hungary

This paper addresses how the visual framing practices of the youth climate movement in Hungary challenge or reinforce post-political environmental discourse. Our analysis focuses on two social movement organizations that emerged in Hungary during the 2018–2019 global wave of climate activism: Fridays For Future Hungary (FFFH) and Extinction Rebellion Hungary (XRH), with particular attention to the forms, issue frames, and emotional frames they employ. To investigate the research question of how climate movements use visual communication to politicize climate change, we combined computational and qualitative methods and undertook a visual frame analysis of N = 789 social media images and videos, circulated by two student climate movements in Hungary. Our results show that the framing of politicizing visuals follows the organizations’ general profiles and it is frequently communicated through the posting of images and videos of demonstrations, which also explains the high proportion of motivational frames, and the frequency of simple, less controversial issue frames in the case of both organizations.