“Ecofascism” the language of denigration

Scope

• Understanding the conflict-driven response to environmental policy in the online public sphere

• Singling out the focal points of the opposition and differentiating them from discourses simply expressing displeasure regarding environmental policies.

Challenges

• Understanding and gauging the impact of the various narratives which regard environmental policies as "repressive" or authoritarian

• Identifying and analysing the derogatory discourse surrounding environmental policies and discourse

Solutions

• Collecting multiplatform data (Twitter, Reddit) in France and in the USA

• Identifying clusters of contestation in the content and community discourse through topic mining and semi-supervised audience mining

• Comparative analysis of the most semantically impactful terms

Results

• Evaluation of the "radicalisation" and "trollification" of criticism towards environmental policies

• Analysis of the generalisation of said repressive terms and analysis of their political impact, comparable to that of a "semantic virus"