Insights into Climate Change Narratives: Emotional Alignment and Engagement Analysis on T ik T ok (2025)

Abstract: TikTok has emerged as a key platform for discussing polarizing topics, including climate change. Despite its growing influence, there is limited research exploring how content features shape emotional alignment between video creators and audience comments, as well as their impact on user engagement. Using a combination of pretrained and fine-tuned textual and visual models, we analyzed 7,110 TikTok videos related to climate change, focusing on content features such as semantic clustering of video transcriptions, visual elements, tonal shifts, and detected emotions. (1) Our findings reveal that positive emotions and videos featuring factual content or vivid environmental visuals exhibit stronger emotional alignment. Furthermore, emotional intensity and tonal coherence in video speech are significant predictors of higher engagement levels, offering new insights into the dynamics of climate change communication on social media. (2) Our preference learning analysis reveals that comment emotions play a dominant role in predicting video shareability, with both positive and negative emotional responses acting as key drivers of content diffusion. We conclude that user engagement—particularly emotional discourse in comments—significantly shapes climate change content shareability.

## introduction over the years, social media platforms have become crucial spaces for discussing pressing issues-including climate change and sustainability-and fostering social activism, particularly among younger audiences @xcite . tiktok has become one of the leading platforms for information gathering, with more than 120 million active users in 2024, @xcite and one in four of them being under the age of 24 @xcite . climate change activism on tiktok has been documented in successful movements like just stop oil (2025) and extinction rebellion (2024), showcasing the platform's power to amplify offline activism. given tiktok's rapid rise in popularity and crucial role in information dissemination, further research is needed to understand how audiences engage with climate change narratives and what features result in the video being more widely disseminated. ## conclusion this study investigates how content features influence audience responses in climate change discussions by analyzing emotional alignment and callto-action engagement, with shareability serving as the primary measure of impact across both textual and visual feature groups. our analysis of emotional alignment between video speech and comments reveals that positive emotions elicit the strongest alignment in audience reactions. furthermore, insights from visual features and semantic clustering indicate that factual and informational content, as well as visually appealing environmental elements, resonate more strongly with viewers. these findings underscore the critical role of content features and thematic focus in shaping emotional engagement. specifically, content that reduces ambiguity fosters closer alignment between the tone of the video and audience reactions, while neutral or inconsistent content tends to invite broader emotional interpretations. ultimately, the nature of the content-whether visually evocative, fact-based, or emotionally positive or negative, profoundly affects how effectively the intended emotional tone resonates with the audience. from a shareability perspective, our findings reveal that comment emotions, whether positive or negative, are the most influential factors in driving call-to-action shareability. moreover, while content-related features primarily influence initial shareability, audience emotional responses, as expressed through comments, become increasingly pivotal in shaping engagement as it grows. unlike video content, comments are dynamic discussions where emotions can influence subsequent comments and elicit further emotions. this highlights tiktok's role as a social platform where engagement is driven by user interactions than by the informational content of the videos, despite its growing popularity as a place to seek information. in conclusion, our study demonstrates that the nature of climate change content on tiktok-whether emotionally dynamic, visually evocative, or factbased-significantly impacts audience engagement and action. these insights can inform content design and offer a framework for optimizing climate change communication to effectively engage and mobilize users for action.