Overview

This study investigates how grassroots climate movements can use social media more effectively to drive local collective action. Working with Extinction Rebellion UK, the authors ran a large-scale real-world experiment to test which combination of message framing and visual imagery best prompted Facebook users to click through for information about attending a local XR climate talk — treated as the first measurable step on a pathway to participation.

Key Findings

• Direct, urgent calls to action ("Don't stand by idly") consistently generated more clicks than polite invitations ("Would you like to come along?"), across all three cities and in the pooled sample.

• Climate impact imagery outperforms protest imagery. Flood images drove significantly more clicks than the protest images XR typically uses in its communications, particularly when paired with exhortation messages.

• Older users (45+) were disproportionately more likely to click, challenging assumptions about digital activism being youth-led, though the authors note older Facebook users are also more likely to engage with ads generally, complicating interpretation.

Stand out data points

• 353,998 Facebook users reached across Birmingham, Oxford, and Cardiff in a single week per city randomized controlled trials. One of the largest causal field experiments in climate communication to date.

• 0.54x fewer clicks for requests vs. exhortations, a statistically robust and practically meaningful gap given the scale.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Solution focus: Indirect relevance. Flood imagery evokes threat, not solution, yet outperformed. This complicates a simple "more solutions = more action" model; threat salience combined with urgent framing may be effective for mobilisation at the awareness stage.

• Actionability: Core relevance. The study provides causal evidence that the form of the ask, exhortation vs. request, independently affects action-taking. Understories should evaluate not just whether an action is present, but how it is framed.

• Justice: The study cannot disaggregate results by race, class, or disability due to Facebook data limitations. The finding that diversity imagery underperformed raises unresolved questions about whose engagement is being optimised. Understories should flag when recommendations derived from this paper may not apply to, or may inadvertently exclude, marginalised communities.

Key quote

"Surprisingly, it contradicts the focus group results, where people said they preferred requests to participate in collective climate action. The results of this study, therefore, suggest that what people say they want may not always match their real-world behavioural responses."

© 2026 Ganga Shreedhar, Joshua Hinton & Laura Thomas-Walters (2026) — Open Access under CC BY 4.0. Reuse permitted with attribution and link to licence.

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