Environmental Misinformation and Audiovisual Serial Narratives. An Automatic Analysis of the Twitter Social Discursiveness on "Seaspiracy"

Abstract

The ongoing pervasive presence of green media content may increase audience environmental consciousness. Indeed, several authors have highlighted the central role played by visual digital media in bringing environmental issues to public and political attention. Within this context the proliferation of streaming services and audience’s everyday use of green media content may facilitate public connections, enhance environmental sensibility, and facilitate behavioural change. This paper explores the insights film and media scholars may get from audience’s ongoing debates related to environmental issues when boosted by audiovisual narratives. We investigate the production and circulation of knowledge and environmental misinformation associated with Seaspiracy (2021), a Netflix documentary about the impact of commercial fishing. This product was criticized for misrepresentation: NGOs, sustainability labels and experts quoted in the documentary have charged the filmmakers with making ‘misleading claims’ and using out-of-context interviews and erroneous statistics. The main aim of this study is to explore the role of digital communication – interpersonal and through the media – in the public definition, elaboration and contestation of environmental issues. We focus on tweets related to the documentary Seaspiracy to understand how misinformation may spread through audiovisual narratives. We use automatic text analysis tools including sentiment analysis and topic detection to understand how audience responses enable or inhibit the discourse in a shared cultural debate on environmental issues.