Missing targets: Engagement metrics and digital organizing in the climate movement

Despite limitations and uncertainties, digital media platforms are integral to mobilization and organizing in the climate movement. Their appeal and utility for public engagement is largely attributed to direct interactions among users, increased visibility, and the ability to measure and validate these interactions through quantified engagement metrics. While the affordances of specific platforms and their influence on social movements have been extensively studied in existing scholarship, the relationship between engagement metrics and climate activism requires further attention. Therefore, this article focuses on the relationship between ubiquitous engagement metrics on digital media platforms and digital organizers in the climate movement. It highlights the different kinds of internal and external stakes for digital climate activists as well as the challenges and compromises that occur when platform affordances – especially their tendency to flatten and quantify interactions – come to be entwined with organizing. The article suggests that future scholarship needs to look beyond perspectives that exclusively emphasize either the technical hostility of platforms or the interpretative flexibility of users that currently define scholarly understanding of the relationship between metrics and users. This can be achieved by paying greater attention to sociopolitical conditions, such as internet access, regulatory frameworks and national climate politics that influence the experiences of digital organizers in the climate movement. These insights can support strategies relevant to different regional, technical and temporal constraints that are so crucial to achieving effective climate action.