Maps That Speak to Us: Mapping Climate Narratives Through Images on TikTok

As a digital researcher, I’ve been analysing social media for over ten years. In a trend that has steadily worsened, negative content dominates, and this shows up in almost every analysis I conduct. Still, even in adverse contexts, it is essential to identify opportunities and offer insights that help build strategies grounded in hope. The analyses we produce are sometimes difficult to explain to people who are themselves the targets of hateful narratives. And yet, when I’ve shared my research with individuals or communities affected by this kind of discourse, it has often helped them feel more empowered and better equipped to respond.

A friend once told me that when you “zoom out,” all you see is fascism, but when you “zoom in,” you see community.

This metaphor has a lot to do with platform design, metrics, and dominant narratives, which tend to be simplistic and alienating, making it hard to perceive the beautiful and complex richness of our societies. The metric of virality often obscures smaller phenomena that are no less important for that reason. I don’t want to be naïve, we are losing ground, but we need to be able to see those other signals that show us what we are doing right, so they can guide us.

The emerging narratives we care about, those that resonate and manage to convey the complexity of our lives, are elusive. They make sense within specific social contexts, sometimes through humour or by speaking between the lines, and most of the time without using a single hashtag or obvious “keyword.” This makes them much harder to capture through conventional term-based analysis. That is why we need specific strategies to observe them.

In 2025, I had the opportunity to analyse TikTok together with my colleagues at LaIntersección. A group of young men gave us access to the content they had liked, and I carried out a visual analysis of those materials. You can see it here. This could be described as a fairly sophisticated audience study. We usually focus on interaction metrics and text analysis because it’s simply easier, but this does not match the central role that images now play in contemporary communication.

The technology we used (PixPlot) makes it possible to generate a navigable map made up of images clustered by visual similarity. This reveals patterns that are very different from those identified through more common analytical approaches and allowed us to identify key narrative features. I have the intuition that we could uncover much more if we continue to develop these image-based methodologies.

The European Climate Foundation is committed to nurturing an ecosystem of communicators, and thanks to its support we have been able to experiment with these ideas. TikTok is becoming an increasingly relevant space, both because of its young audience and the nature of its content. Every time I analyse it, I find narrative insights that can be transferred to our communication strategies. This time, however, I won’t be doing it alone, but together with a group of experts.

This is how this visual cartography device for climate imaginaries comes into being: a promising experimental idea whose outcome we cannot fully predict, but one in which we are confident it will help us learn a great deal about how to anticipate and strengthen our strategies. It is a device designed to guide and activate our narrative power. We will generate insights and share them. This group of eleven experts, working across digital communication, content creation, and technology, will decide what they want to observe and how to enrich the data through an iterative process. An adventure that will allow us to see phenomena that are not visible at first glance: stepping outside our digital bubbles to listen to what the data is telling us.

We are very much looking forward to putting this device into practice, sharing the learnings as they emerge, and replicating the experience.

We’ll keep you posted 😉