AI-inferred expressed well-being and collective-action discourse in climate-change campaigns on X

arXiv:2609.22096v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Climate campaigns are often evaluated through attention and mobilization, but less is known about the well-being language that accompanies them. Whether campaign periods alter positive affect and hope, and whether happiness aligns with action language, remains unresolved. We analysed 364,118 public Twitter/X posts from Earth Day, Earth Hour, Global Climate Action Day and World Environment Day in 19 occurrence-years, using 30-day pre-event, event and post-event windows. A versioned weighted lexical model estimated happiness, future-oriented hope, collective capability, distress and action language. Event-period happiness prevalence was 9.02 percentage points higher than the pre-event baseline , whereas paired occurrence contrasts showed a 10.75-point decline in action language, indicating a happiness--action divergence. The happiness estimate remained positive across composition and text-deduplication checks, but was less precise under a 19-cluster wild bootstrap. Happier source posts had lower odds of an observed matched retweet cascade.