The networked public of #schoolstrike4climate and #auspol: an exploratory study of young people's environmental activism on Twitter

As global temperatures and concerns about climate change are rising, young people have been stepping out onto the street to call for action as part of the School Strikes 4 Climate movement. These strikes are an important opportunity for young people to enact their participatory citizenship, given the barriers they face to formal means of civic participation. With this in mind, this paper explores how young people use Twitter to identify with and express their political and civic identities as part of the climate strikes movement. While previous analyses of Twitter data have mapped how networked publics of environmental activists form, due to the difficulty in determining the demographics of Twitter users, the roles that young people play in these publics are not well understood. We aim to address this gap by using a deep learning algorithm to predict the demographics of users and provide an exploratory investigation of how young people engage in this online space. Informed by the ecologies of influence conceptual framework, we identify that young people focus their online attention in specific directions, such as towards the government, towards 'older' users, and towards other young people. As we discuss how young people focus their attention in various directions, we will consider the implications for how educators approach teaching and learning related to the environment, sustainability and citizenship in the classroom, schools and the wider community.