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

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 migration; the terminology, rhetoric, and normative assumptions expressed; and the visual representation of phenomena, actors, and subjects. We identify six distinct frames: Overwhelming Millions, Struggles to Survive, Disappearing Islands, A Complex Picture, Climate Havens, and Wrong Direction!. This includes a mixture of well-known frames previously identified in the literature and new frames that have not received much academic attention. A securitised understanding of climate migration as a threat to the international order often funtions as clickbait behind which more complex combinations of framings can be identified. We also highlight contradictions between visual and narrative elements. This analysis emphasises the importance of including visual media in analyses of discourse and rhetoric on climate migration and suggests that without them, we can only achieve a partial picture of public understandings of climate-related migration.