Skip to content
DraconiticResearch
Search Sources API
197,768 studies31 sourcesUpdated 28 min ago
Peer-reviewedCC BY 4.0Environmental Research Letters

Incivility in Public Health Policy Discussions Spills Over to Public Engagement with Climate Issues: Evidence from English Language Social Media

  • Hasti Narimanzadeh1
  • Arash Badie-Modiri2
  • Iuliia Smirnova3
  • Ted Hsuan Yun Chen4
4 affiliations
  1. 1Aalto University
  2. 2RIKEN Center for Computational Science
  3. 3University of Helsinki
  4. 4George Mason University
Open at sourcePDFDOICite

Abstract

Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around climate change and other issues at the science-policy nexus. We study cross-domain spillover of incivility in public engagements with climate change and public health on English language Twitter and Reddit using the COVID-19 period as a case study. To assess whether spillover exists between these two policy domains, we examined how the incivility of climate discussions on social media varied by their co-occurrence with COVID-19 content and temporal coincidence with pandemic events. We find strong evidence of the signatures of affective polarization surrounding COVID-19 spilling into the climate change domain. Across different social media systems, COVID-19 content is associated with incivility in climate discussions. These patterns of increased antagonism were responsive to pandemic events that made the link between science and public policy more salient. We also looked at how climate discussions about international organizations and elites changed with the pandemic's onset to show that the observed incivility spillover activated along overlapping pre-pandemic political cleavages, specifically anti-internationalist populist beliefs that linked climate policy opposition to vaccine hesitancy. Our findings show how affective polarization in public engagement with science becomes entrenched across policy domains, which has implications for how the public engages with and communicates about issues such as climate change and public health.

Related

  1. Countering climate misinformation with large language models: Evidence from ChatGPT
    Stephanie Jean Tsang, Dandan Wang
    PLOS ClimatePeer-reviewedCC BY 4.0Full textNeuroscienceClimate sciencePLOS
  2. Climate health action in Latin America and the Caribbean: Priorities identified through a multi-stakeholder engagement process
    Gina Polo Infante, Marino Mejía Rocha, Katerine Ariza Ruiz +13
    PLOS ClimatePeer-reviewedCC BY 4.0Full textNeuroscienceClimate sciencePLOS
  3. Salient air pollution mobilizes bottom-up green engagement: Evidence from the world's largest green mobile program.
    Jiafu An, Jiawen Huang, Chen Lin +1
    PNAS nexusPeer-reviewedCC BY-NCFull text1 citedEnvironmental science & pollutionEurope PMC
  4. Passive retrofit strategies for climate-resilient high-rise social housing: evidence from sydney under current and future extreme climate conditions
    Mohammad Abousaeidi, Gloria Pignatta, Negin Nazarian
    City and Environment InteractionsPeer-reviewedCC BYFull textEnvironmental science & pollutionDOAJ
  5. Evidence from 2024 Storm Boris indicates anthropogenic climate change amplifies floods more than extreme precipitation
    Peter Miersch, István Dunkl, Antonio Sánchez-Benítez +6
    Science AdvancesPeer-reviewedCC BYFull textClimate scienceSci. Adv.CrossrefEurope PMCPMC

Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{narimanzadeh2026incivility,
  title = {{Incivility in Public Health Policy Discussions Spills Over to Public Engagement with Climate Issues: Evidence from English Language Social Media}},
  author = {Hasti Narimanzadeh and Arash Badie-Modiri and Iuliia Smirnova and Ted Hsuan Yun Chen},
  journal = {Environmental Research Letters},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.1088/1748-9326/aeb682},
  url = {https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aeb682},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Incivility in Public Health Policy Discussions Spills Over to Public Engagement with Climate Issues: Evidence from English Language Social Media
AU  - Hasti Narimanzadeh
AU  - Arash Badie-Modiri
AU  - Iuliia Smirnova
AU  - Ted Hsuan Yun Chen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/20
JO  - Environmental Research Letters
DO  - 10.1088/1748-9326/aeb682
UR  - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aeb682
AB  - Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around climate change and other issues at the science-policy nexus. We study cross-domain spillover of incivility in public engagements with climate change and public health on English language Twitter and Reddit using the COVID-19 period as a case study. To assess whether spillover exists between these two policy domains, we examined how the incivility of climate discussions on social media varied by their co-occurrence with COVID-19 content and temporal coincidence with pandemic events. We find strong evidence of the signatures of affective polarization surrounding COVID-19 spilling into the climate change domain. Across different social media systems, COVID-19 content is associated with incivility in climate discussions. These patterns of increased antagonism were responsive to pandemic events that made the link between science and public policy more salient. We also looked at how climate discussions about international organizations and elites changed with the pandemic's onset to show that the observed incivility spillover activated along overlapping pre-pandemic political cleavages, specifically anti-internationalist populist beliefs that linked climate policy opposition to vaccine hesitancy. Our findings show how affective polarization in public engagement with science becomes entrenched across policy domains, which has implications for how the public engages with and communicates about issues such as climate change and public health.
SN  - 1748-9326
ER  -