A New Generation of Climate Activism: Visualizing Twitter Data on Fridays For Future Movement.

Since Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist, started the “school strike for climate” outside of the Swedish parliament in August 2018, the solo protest has snowballed into a global wave of strikes with an estimated 4 to 7.6 million people marching on the street in 2019. As a youth-led global social movement, Twitter has become the key platform to coordinate, participate and discuss the Fridays For Future (FFF). Our interactive data visualization project illustrates the peak moment of FFF between September 16 to 30, 2019 by collecting a total of 123,841 tweets using four popular hashtags adopted by both supporters and opponents of FridaysForFuture ( #Fridaysforfuture, #howdareyou, #stolenchildhood, #youth4climate).

This project is a collaboration with Dr. Chen Guo (Data Analystics, James Madison University), Dr. Nan Zheng (Journalism, James madison University)