Protest locations and digital affordances in environmental communication: patterns and issues of scaling in movement activism

In the face of the climate crisis, environmental activists use digital technologies to scale locally rooted conflicts across spatial and political levels. Environmental conflicts are ideal for studying scaling in digital communication because they are inherently connected to global issues such as climate change, while also being rooted in local struggles over land and resources. Our study refers to social media communication in the protests against the demolition of the village of Lützerath in Germany’s coal-mining region between 2021 and 2023. Drawing on communication on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X, we investigate how scaling, translocal connectivity, and issues are related to platform affordances. Findings show that digital media enable a local environmental conflict to be raised primarily to regional and national levels, while scaling to transnational and global levels remains comparatively rare and symbolic. Platform affordances structure these dynamics: Facebook facilitates translocal collective action and organizational coordination, users on Instagram foreground visuals of local nature and environmental damage, and Twitter supports real-time reporting within highly politicized publics. The study demonstrates that, while the possibilities of digital platforms complicate and diversify processes of scaling in environmental activism, they do not remove the relevance of local and national political arenas.