PLATFORM-AFFORDED TRANSNATIONAL ADVOCACY: YOUTH AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY OF THE #STOPWILLOW CAMPAIGN

Abstract

This study introduces and empirically grounds the concept of Platform-Afforded Transnational Advocacy (PATA) to explain how youth activists operationalize strategic narratives across digital platforms to influence transnational environmental discourse. Focusing on the #StopWillow campaign—a youth-led digital resistance to the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska—this research analyzes 11,499 public comments and platform content from six prominent climate influencers on TikTok and Twitter/X. Departing from traditional Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN) models, the study reinterprets the four core advocacy mechanisms (information, symbolic, leverage, and accountability politics) through the lens of platform affordances such as algorithmic amplification, emotional resonance, and short-form storytelling. Using qualitative content analysis and semiotic coding, the findings demonstrate how influencer-activists construct platform-calibrated narratives that convert affect into algorithmic visibility and visibility into reputational pressure. Emotional storytelling—anchored in eco-anxiety, moral urgency, and intergenerational grievance—proved more effective in mobilizing publics than data-driven content alone. This digital repertoire reconfigures TAN dynamics by shifting the source of legitimacy from institutional proximity to discursive performance. By theorizing and evidencing PATA, the study contributes to environmental politics and digital activism literature by showing how digitally native youth are emerging as central agents of transnational pressure, shaping global climate discourse not through formal participation, but through narrative orchestration in emotionally and visually saturated media ecologies.

Keywords: Platform-Afforded Advocacy, Transnational Environmental Discourse, Youth Climate Activism, #StopWillow, Strategic Narratives