Cross-Platform Social Media Analytics for Sustainable Climate Discourse: A Multimodal Analysis of Frame Propagation Across Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram

This research establishes a multimodal analytics framework, while considering platform functionality, to understand climate-related messaging in environmental campaigns on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. The research utilizes systematic qualitative content analysis to analyze 60 artifacts from environmental campaigns, including those of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, WWF, and Greenpeace International, collected during 2024–2025. Entman’s framing theory and the multimodal discourse analysis framework proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen are used to model cross-modal relations. The results indicate that the platforms differ in their communicative functions. For example, YouTube enables time-based audiovisual elements to frame disasters and science; Instagram frames campaigns through aspirational images and social media influencers in a hopeful manner; and Facebook facilitates infographics and polyvocal framing of campaigns.