Is Facebook ‘green’? Do political leaders and citizens use this social media to support the adoption of greener policies? The aim of this paper is to investigate on whether and how Facebook is used by politicians and citizens as an arena to spread environmental policy proposals or simple information about the environment. The study covers 127 Facebook pages of political leaders in 31 different advanced industrial democracies. The 127 pages have been under observation for 26 months and 99,234 posts have been scrutinized. 25,151 out of these 99,234 posts have been manually coded and analyzed in order to measure how often contemporary leaders talk about environmental issues on Facebook and whether citizens have a preference in sharing on Facebook environmental issues in comparison to other policy issues. We expect that countries with higher economic wealth and low environmental pollution, left wing leaders and citizens would use Facebook to support environmental issues. Preliminary findings show however that: i) 2% of the total posts have concerned the environmental issue; ii) no relevant differences are noted between countries with different level of economic wealth and environmental pollution taken into consideration iii) left wing leaders support more environmental issues than right wing leaders iv) citizens do not support and spread more environmental issues in comparison to different policy issues.
