The Rhetoric of Environmental Activism in Contemporary Social Media Advocacy Campaigns
- Authors
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Dr.R. Velanganni
Author
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- Keywords:
- environmental activism, social media, rhetorical analysis, digital communication, audience engagement
- Abstract
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This paper examines the application of rhetorical strategies in contemporary environmental advocacy campaigns through social media and the way linguistic, visual, and narrative signifiers lead to audience engagement and persuasion. This paper will assess the way elements of traditional rhetoric (i.e., ethos, pathos, and logos) work in the multimodal, fast-paced digital environment. A qualitative discourse analytic approach was utilized to examine a dataset of 120 social media entries, comprising 50 posts from Instagram, 40 from Twitter, and 30 from Facebook, collected over a 6-month window. added depending on the applicability of the campaigns to climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable environmental advocacy. The analysis took a rhetorical tool that integrated the Aristotelian rhetoric and digital communication methods, including narratives, visuals, and hashtags. The research revealed that specifically, Instagram (62%) posts were more likely to employ the rhetorical technique of pathos than Twitter (55%) and Facebook (48%) posts. The highest balance was in Facebook, where ethos (30) and logos (22) were equally utilized. Although all of them used multimodal strategies, hashtags (92%) and images (85%) were the most common. A sense of urgency was utilized in 46 % of the narrative strategy posts that framed a crisis. The most active were the posts in Instaposts that included both visuals and pathos, with an average of 12,500 likes, 3,200 shares, and 1,150 comments. The best advocacy campaigns have been shown to integrate narratives of emotions and images. These campaigns have also benefited from the presence of ethos and logic. These findings highlight the importance of being adaptable with the rhetorical techniques and strategies of digital environmental communication.
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- Published
- 2025-12-31
- Issue
- Vol. 14 No. 4 (2025)
- Section
- Articles