Local (or Not) Insecurity on Arctic Twitter/X: Global Insecurity and Climate Change

Authors

  • Gabriella Gricius Colorado State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22584/nr56.2024.003

Keywords:

Social Media, Security, Public Opinion, Arctic

Abstract

Advance Online Article first published September 2024. Page numbers not final.

While Twitter, now known as X, has been used to study political sentiments around elections and political discourse broadly speaking, less research has explored questions of insecurity. Using a data set of Arctic tweets between 1 January 2020 and 31 March 2023, and the R programming language, I asked how posts regarding this region framed the debate around insecurity. My work finds that spikes of insecurity on Arctic Twitter/X did not directly correlate with moments of global insecurity such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or the COVID-19 pandemic from early 2020. Instead, they reference environmental insecurities such as the 2020 Norilsk oil spill in Russia and other Arctic-specific events that almost all have to do with climate change, both locally and globally. These findings suggest that similar to public opinion polls, local insecurities have more resonance with Arctic publics, rather than highly politicized moments of global insecurity.

Author Biography

Gabriella Gricius, Colorado State University

PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science

Front Cover of the Northern Review journal Number 46, featuring a watercolour painting of beautiful multicoloured northern lights against a starry sky, with conifer trees in the foreground. Cover artist Doug Rutherford, Whitehorse

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Published

09/26/2024

Issue

No. 56 (2024)

Section

Special Collection: Media Representations of the Arctic

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Gabriella Gricius

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