Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Motivated Sharing: A Study of Climate Skeptics' Information Sharing Practices on Reddit
University of Borås, Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT.
University of Borås, Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT.
2026 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

Through the use of affordance theory and the theory of motivated reasoning, this thesis studies the information sharing practices of climate skeptics on social media. Using feature analysis and affordance theory, we analyse the affordances of the social media platform Reddit. By collecting posts and comments from the subreddit r/climateskeptics we are able to conduct a thematic analysis to understand how and what users share within the community. The results from the feature analysis suggest that Reddit's platform affordances shape a social and technological context which gives users agency over information sharing but inherently incentivises conformity to community norms. This likely leads to a tendency toward echo chamber formation. Other findings indicate that climate skeptics are primarily motivated by political ideology, with right-wing affiliation being prevalent within their community. Climate skeptics primarily share information through the use of images and URLs, with the aim of confirming their shared beliefs. By spreading information purportedly backed by “facts”, the community seemingly aims to legitimise their beliefs. Together these findings provide a deeper understanding of how platform affordances work to amplify the information sharing practices born from motivated reasoning.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2026.
Keywords [en]
information sharing, climate skeptics, climate change, motivated reasoning, platform affordances, Reddit
National Category
Information Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-35683OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hb-35683DiVA, id: diva2:2069003
Available from: 2026-06-24 Created: 2026-06-10 Last updated: 2026-06-24Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

Motivated sharing Svensson Holm(850 kB)109 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 850 kBChecksum SHA-512
85740b72b7629e63e19a37ffe35d0eb1054fd8d3388321013c3e11cc52571a673b170ab3807ed365a8868fc294339a781aa781c576a53911eddee293ec071520
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

By organisation
Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT
Information Studies

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 121 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf