Message quality and audience characteristics shape evaluation and impact of real-world social media climate communication

To improve climate communication, it is crucial to understand how different audiences respond to pro-climate messages, particularly in information environments where accurate information competes with climate-contrarian disinformation. Here, we analyze responses to real-world climate change information and their downstream consequences for climate change concern and information search behavior. Using computational social science techniques, we gathered a diverse set of real-world pro-climate messages from the social media platform Twitter/X. These pro-climate messages were evaluated on several dimensions by a representative sample of the UK population (N = 503). Message evaluations from conservative and liberal participants showed substantial covariation, pointing to an overall consensus on the ranking of the persuasive and informative qualities of the messages. Specification curve analysis, in addition, revealed robust main effects of individual differences on message evaluation. Coupling the data with results from a large cross-cultural experiment (N = 2226) showed that collective message evaluations shared strong commonalities across nations. These evaluations, in turn, predicted shifts in climate concern and climate information search behavior, with more positively evaluated messages decreasing the likelihood of subsequent engagement with climate-contrarian disinformation. Alongside the empirical data, we release the ClimateChirp database containing validated pro-climate stimuli for future climate communication research. Despite individual differences in responses to climate communication, we found an overall consensus on aggregate ratings across audience groups, which were associated with shifts in concern and behavior after message exposure.