Comparing Climate Change Content and Comments across Instagram Reels, TikTok , and YouTube Shorts and Long Videos

ABSTRACT Social media plays a vital role as a communication channel for pertinent topics, including climate change. This paper investigates the content and comments of short and long‐format videos on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to compare climate change discourse on these platforms. Eighty videos and their respective 69,135 comments were collected and analyzed using content analysis, statistical analysis, data visualization, and social network analysis. Our findings show that in our dataset, videos in the short‐format (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts) provide all sorts of content, while YouTube long videos only focus on educational and activism content. The short‐format videos also show different stances towards climate change, such as a climate change denier stance, while YouTube long videos do not. For comments, videos in the short‐format had less engagement compared to YouTube long videos. Our findings inform implications for both researchers and social media platform designers.