• Ulrik Raabjerg Soendergaard, State of Green

Project website

Project achievements:

PolarVis addresses the relationship between two pressing phenomena: networked visual persuasion and societal polarisation. Online communication is increasingly ‘visual first’, and images, videos, and memes are powerful in focusing attention, carrying meaning and emotion. How societal actors use visuals to persuade can significantly shape ideas about us, them, the big issues of our time – and about the very existence of dangerous divides. The visual dimension is an area of political life that is increasingly salient. Until recently, it has been difficult to study at social media scale.

PolarVis aimed to understand how, why, and with what consequences visual content becomes a mechanism of integration and polarisation in digitalized societies. The project studied online political discourse in and around movements for and against a contested issue – climate action – in Europe. It analysed four key communication junctures and the interaction between them: (1) How climate (counter)movements use visuals in their communication repertoires; (2) The characteristics of climate visuals with respect to themes, frames and narratives; (3) How online audiences react, and how antagonistic and affective (counter)publics emerge, and (4) How such content, and associated affect, spreads across groups and social media platforms.

To this end, the consortium brought together a unique interdisciplinary framework that integrates qualitative approaches, network analysis, and computational text and image analysis in pursuit of the project objectives. The project team interviewed strategic communicators; used visual content analysis techniques to understand repertoires and themes; and investigated processes of integration and polarisation in the emotions around and sharing of such content within and between groups. To fill a gap in the study of online visual political communication, the team developed and applied novel methods to capture meaningful visual topics, and the associated patterns of polarisation and affect.

PolarVis shows how visual content can become a focal point for connection and conflict, and how strategic communicators and individual social media users may deliberately or unwittingly engage in polarising processes. The findings confirm that visual content spreads faster, wider, and with more intense affective reactions than other types of content on social media. However, high drama and emotions are not winning strategies for all. The findings also show that online communication about climate issues is characterised by diverging and asymmetrically affective visual landscapes. Connections run across borders rather than climate ideological divides. Visual repertoires that cue credibility for some shift to distrust, oppositional reaction and re-framing for others.

PolarVis findings illuminate the online visual dimension of societal polarisation, and dilemmas facing stakeholders trying to engage citizens with contentious issues such as climate change. Deeply diverging affective visual landscapes can play a role in perceived polarisation. They can also challenge persuasion that requires credibility and trust, and ultimately the conditions for meaningful democratic contestation.

Beyond its basic research, PolarVis developed tools to help stakeholders and citizens perceive the dynamics involved. The project thereby offers a more comprehensive basis from which to negotiate a visual terrain that can divide but also connect.

Publications:

• Doerr N., Florencia Langa M., Images of Nature in Online Climate Activism in Germany and Argentina: Androcentrism, affective connections and Non-Human ‘Everybodies’, Austrian Journal of Development Studies, 2024, Vol. 39(3-4), 33-63, DOI.ORG/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-40-1-33
• Doerr N., Florencia Langa M., Images of Fear, Science and the Antichrist: Visual Narratives and Emotion Norms in building Trust or Mistrust in International Climate Change Online Debates at COP26 2024 [NOT YET PUBLISHED]
• Rossi L., Segerberg A., Arminio L., Magnani M., Do you see what I see? Emotional reaction to visual content in the online debate about climate change, Environmental Communication, 2024, 1-19, doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2420787
• Segerberg A., Magnani M., Visual digital intermediaries and global climate communication: is climate change still a distant problem on YouTube? PLOS ONE (Accepted), 2025
• Arminio L., Rossi L., Which Reveals Ideology Better? Comparing Self-Presentation and Public Rhetoric in the Facebook Climate Debate via Embeddings Analysis, In: Aiello L. M., Chakraborty, T., and Gaito, S. The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2024). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15213. Springer, Cham., 2025 ISBN HERE
• Arminio L., Rossi L., Measuring the Sociolinguistic Patterns of Climate Debate Polarization in the Facebook Context, In: Aiello L. M., Chakraborty, T., and Gaito, S. The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2024). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15213. Springer, Cham., 2025 ISBN HERE
• Doerr, N., Florencia Langa, M., Images of Nature in Online Climate Activism in Germany and Argentina: Science, Affect and Non-Human ‘Everybodies’, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik / Austrian Journal for Development Policy, Mattersburger Kreis, vol. 40(1-2), 2024, https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-40-1-33
• Segerberg, A., Rossi, L., Magnani, M., Arminio, L., Do You See What I See? Emotional Reaction to Visual Content in the Online Debate About Climate Change, Environmental Communication, Taylor and Francis, 19(3), 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2420787
• Rossi, L., The Problems of LLM-Generated Data in Social Science Research, Sociologica: International Journal for Sociological Debate, Il Mulino – Università di Bologna,  vol. 18(2), 2024, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/19576
• Segerberg, A., Rossi, L., Magnani, M., Piqueras, M., Arminio, L., Leveraging VLLMs for Visual Clustering: Image-to-Text Mapping Shows Increased Semantic Capabilities and Interpretability, Social Science Computer Review, 2025, SAGE, https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393251376
• Rossi, L., Arminio, L., Understanding the Visual Discourse on Climate Action: A Semantic Clustering Approach, Computational Social Science, 2026
• Segerberg, A., Magnani, M., Visual Digital Intermediaries and Global Climate Communication: Is Climate Change Still a Distant Problem on YouTube?, PLOS One, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318338
• Segerberg, A., Uba, K., Magnani, M., Climate Clash: A Multimodal Analysis of Movement–Countermovement Interactions in the Digital Sphere, American Behavioral Scientist, 2025, SAGE, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642251377
• Segerberg, A., Magnani, M., Piqueras, M., An Image Is Worth K Topics: A Visual Structural Topic Model with Pretrained Embeddings, Political Analysis, 2025
• Segerberg, A., Magnani, M., Piqueras, M., Contestation and Polarisation around the Global Climate Strike, Computational Communication Research, 2025
• Rossi, L., Magnani, M., Polarisation in Social Networks, Network Science, Cambridge University Press, 2025
• Rossi, L., Computational Approaches to Researching Short Videos, Computational Communication Research, 2025
• Rossi, L., The Handbook of Social and Communication Networks, Edward Elgar, 2026
• Doerr, N., Florencia Langa, M., The Politics of Trust: Emotions and Visual Narratives in Online Climate Change Debates at COP26, International Political Sociology, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(4), 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf029
• Waldherr, A., Protest Locations and Digital Affordances in Environmental Communication: Patterns and Issues of Scaling in Movement Activism, Social Movement Studies, 2025
• Waldherr, A., Parted Ways: Tracing Transnationalization and Fragmentation of Public Spheres across Hybrid Media Systems, Javnost, 2025
• Rossi, L., Righetti, N., Network Analysis of Transnational Communication on Social Media, The Handbook of Social and Communication Networks, Edward Elgar, 2026
• Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Tolochko, P., Issue Networks, The Handbook of Social and Communication Networks, Edward Elgar, 2026
• Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Tolochko, P., Mapping and Measuring Topological Polarization: An Embedding-Based Approach for Social Networks, Network Science, 2025
• Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Tolochko, P., Nakamura, D., Kakavand, A., Kulichkina, A., A Longitudinal Approach to the Analysis of Social Media Engagement, Zemki Working Paper, 2025
• Oross, D., Can Democratic Innovation Work in an Unfavourable Political Context?, Climate Assemblies: New Civic Institutions for a Climate-Changed World, De Gruyter, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111328393
• Oross, D., Global Case Studies on the Far Right’s Politics of Nature, Patterns of Prejudice, 58(2-3), 2025, Taylor and Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2025.2504835
• Oross, D., Mikecz, D., Visual Framing and Politicization of Climate Change, Journal of Environmental Communication, 2025
• Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Tolochko, P., Nakamura, D., Shetty, A., Face to Engagement: User Reactions to Facial Emotion Expressions on TikTok, 2026
• Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Tolochko, P., Divisive Imagery: Affective Polarisation Analysis in Climate Activism Visuals, 2026
• Oross, D., Doerr, N., Mikecz, D., Florencia Langa, M., Visual Contention in Climate Communication, 2026
• Segerberg, A., Rossi, L., Oross, D., Doerr, N., Uba, K., Magnani, M., Florencia Langa, M., Six Years of European Visual Climate Activism, 2026
• Doerr, N., Florencia Langa, M., Far Right Visual Boundary Strategies on Citizenship, British Journal of Sociology, 2026
• Rossi, L., Arminio, L., Which Reveals Ideology Better? Comparing Self-Presentation and Public Rhetoric in the Facebook Climate Debate, Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Springer, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78548-1_14
• Rossi, L., Arminio, L., Measuring the Sociolinguistic Patterns of Climate Debate Polarization, Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Springer, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85240-4_25
• Segerberg, A., Doerr, N., Uba, K., Magnani, M., Florencia Langa, M., Visual Persuasion and Polarisation, 2026,