Countering the “Climate Cult” – Framing Cascades in Far-Right Digital Networks

Abstract

In many contemporary democracies, digital networks on the far-right have established themselves as “alternatives” to liberal institutions. Within this nexus of parties, hyper-partisan news, and social media channels, opposition to climate change mitigation has emerged as a central cross-cutting issue. Despite the prominence of these trends, we still know relatively little about the hierarchies that govern these communicative ties. This study draws on the concept of cascading frame activation to trace communication flows between four distinct actor types within the German far right. We apply a mixed-methods approach across social media and websites over a period of 19 months. First, we conduct a time series analysis via a vector autoregression model, to assess potential causal relationships between the issue agendas of far-right actor types. Automated text analysis then inductively generates a lexicon exclusive to far-right posts about climate change, which we qualitatively assess and manually cluster into distinct frame categories. We conclude by tracing framing cascade sequences across the various actor types. Our results reveal significant associations between the issue agenda of far-right actors, especially among right-wing news sites (RNS) and hyperactive accounts. Within this network, the most dominant frames demarcate out-groups, such as the Green Party or climate activists. Notably, RNS play a central role in shaping this discourse, initiating 42% of the identified frames before they find wider dissemination. These findings expand our understanding of hierarchies and new communication pathways among partisan media, political parties, and their extended digital networks on the far right.