From November 26th to November 27th, Kilian Buehling (Freie Universität/Weizenbaum Institute) participated in a workshop about “Visual Aspects of Political Communication and Digital Platforms” organized by the Collegium Helveticum. The workshop was designed to create a dynamic interdisciplinary forum, bringing together researchers from diverse fields to explore the evolving challenges and opportunities in the discipline.
Kilian Buehling had the opportunity to present his work on the visual framing of climate denialism, co-authored with Jing Zeng (University of Zurich) and Annett Heft (Universität Tübingen, Freie Universität/Weizenbaum Institute), on several platforms. He presented “Visual Framing of Climate Denialism: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan”. Previous research has shown that climate change denial deepens public polarization and diminishes support for mitigation policies. Kilian Buehling’s, Jing Zeng’s, and Annett Heft’s work generates platform-specific insights into the role of visual content in online climate denialism communication. It maps how and which visual elements are used to promote different types of climate denialism on Reddit, X, and 4chan by employing multi-modal LLM-based classification methods.