A Mixed-Method Analysis of Climate-Change Denialism as Blunt-Edged Politics in Participatory Media Ecologies

Contemporary climate-change denialism increasingly thrives on participatory platforms where visibility emerges from design features and interaction incentives. However, scholarship lacks circulation-aware evidence linking denialist frames to platform affordances and diffusion patterns. This study introduces blunt-edged politics and examines how this scales within participatory media ecologies. Using an analytical modeling approach, the study integrates deductive–inductive content analysis, sentiment labeling, logistic regression, and hashtag network mapping across selected social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, sampled across three Conference of the Parties (COP)-related periods. Reliability scores were high, and a supervised transformer classifier generated sentiment labels for the study. Results show that conspiracy frames dominated high-engagement flows; shares and comments predicted denialist presence, while likes did not. YouTube displayed the highest adjusted odds of denialism. The hashtag network formed modular clusters bridged by a few high-brokerage anchors. Here, denialism operates as a circulation regime, suggesting the need for counter-strategies that disrupt brokerage and strengthen share-ready corrective narratives.