Climate change and migration on YouTube: diverse framings behind climate refugee clickbait

Article Open access Published: 05 May 2026 Sarah Haider-Nash 1 & David Durand-Delacre 2   Humanities and Social Sciences Communications , Article number:  (2026) Cite this article We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply. Subjects Abstract YouTube is an increasingly popular source of both mainstream and independent news as well as entertainment. This includes content about climate change and migration which is increasingly being uploaded to the platform. Yet to date, the majority of discourse and frame analysis about climate migration has focused on written text in print media and minimal attention has been paid to alternative media sources and formats. Against the background of the growing trend towards online video-based news, we close this gap with an analysis of representations of climate migration available on YouTube. As a basis for the analysis, we built a database of 239 English-language videos published between January 2009 and December 2023. We apply frame analysis to a sub-sample of 65 videos from the database, identifying key assumptions made about climate
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