Platform power and climate responsibility: A longitudinal view on digital platform companies’ environmental discourse

Abstract

In recent decades, multinational platform companies – so-called ‘big tech’ – have made major efforts to strengthen their environmental sustainability in the face of the climate crisis. Indeed, because of their accumulated power, these companies can be seen to be subject to significant societal and environmental obligations. Yet, we know little about the ways in which the companies address these obligations in their corporate discourses. Using a combination of computer-assisted text mining and qualitative text analysis of corporate blogs, we studied how platform companies’ public communication on the climate crisis and their discursive legitimation strategies have developed over a 20-year period. Our findings show how the platform companies become self-proclaimed ‘climate leaders’ who seek to expand their socio-economic power by engaging in a widening range of actions and partnerships and presenting themselves as mobilisers in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Climate leadership is constructed through four discursive positions – corporate sustainability pioneer, product and service provider, partner and innovator, all based on the expertise and exceptional capabilities the platform companies envision themselves having.

Keywords

Platform companies climate change environmental sustainability legitimation corporate communication

Introduction

Digital technology is increasingly touted as a prominent solution to achieve sustainable development goals, and it has often been celebrated as a pathway to environmental sustainability in policy and business discourses (Brenner and Hartl, 2021). Yet, over the last years, concerns have been expressed over the compatibility of digital technology with environmental sustainability (Freitag et al., 2021; Istrate et al., 2024). This criticism has also targeted digital platform companies – multinational corporations (MNCs) that dominate global markets in social media, cloud infrastructure, digital search, digital advertising, mobile operations and digital messaging. Big tech companies that own digital platforms and are among the world's largest enterprises by market value, but more notably, they have accumulated significant socio-cultural and political power as other actors – businesses, governments, non-governmental actors and the public – have become dependent on their infrastructural services (Helberger et al., 2018; Nieborg et al., 2024; Plantin et al., 2018).

Scholars of critical platform studies have investigated the consequences of this increasing infrastructural power over communication flows and cultural industries (Poell et al., 2021; Van Dijck and Poell, 2015) as well as their contributions to discrimination and surveillance (Eubanks, 2018). On a more general level, recent years have witnessed a so-called ‘techlash’ against platform companies for monopolisation and causing various types of social harm (e.g. Popiel, 2022). This has resulted in increasing demands from policymakers, activists and citizens for platform companies to become more socially responsible. While a rich body of literature has accumulated on the environmental impact of media products, infrastructures and technologies (e.g. Brodie, 2024; Crawford, 2021; Cubitt, 2017; Gabrys, 2011; Maxwell and Miller, 2012), the connections between environmental sustainability and digital platform companies, specifically, are less studied until recently (cf. Brevini and Doctor, 2023; Vrikki, 2024).

Because of their accumulated power and unparalleled resources, major platform companies can be seen to be subject to significant societal and environmental obligations (Pickard, 2021: 326), which is expected to be reflected in their corporate social responsibility actions and corporate communication. Corporate communication is used by companies to discursively construct public images of them and their responsibility (Siltaoja, 2009) and to construct desired realities and legitimate societal positions (Vaara et al., 2024). As corporations are increasingly expected to act in sustainable ways, disclosures of social and environmental responsibility play a growing role in obtaining social acceptance (Suchman, 1995). This generates a need to critically examine the ways in which the platform companies articulate their policies and rationales for environmental sustainability.

As highlighted by Lehuedé (2024), focusing on discourses allows for a political analysis of technology in society by showing how meanings are attached to such seemingly ‘natural’ material elements and thus they are constructed in particular ways to construct desired realities. By unpacking the environmental discourses of six major platform companies (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Twitter/X) over time, we can demonstrate how they attempt to shape understandings of technology and themselves as sustainability actors that work in favour of their interests. In this study, we ask: (RQ1) how platform corporations communicate their response to climate change over time to build their legitimacy and authority, and (RQ2) how their evolving sustainability discourse and actions are entangled with their pursuit of social and market power? Our empirical material is collected from the corporate blogs and news sections of the platform companies. These are spaces where the corporations announce their activities, new features and policies, as well as respond to public criticism and aim to legitimise their actions. Using a combination of computer-assisted text mining and qualitative analysis to build a longitudinal view to the data, we reveal how their responses to the climate crisis have evolved over 20 years.

Drawing on platform studies (Burgess, 2021), and studies of discursive legitimation (Vaara et al., 2024), the study contributes to the critical research that examines how corporations utilise discourses of environmental sustainability in their public communication to legitimate their positions in society (e.g. Ihlen, 2009; Jaworska, 2018; Nyberg and Wright, 2016; Reyes, 2011).

While a prosperous literature (e.g. Franta, 2018; Jaworska, 2018; Schlichting, 2013) exists on large MNCs and climate change discourses, few studies have addressed platform companies’ environmental responsibility discourses (cf. Vrikki, 2024). Similarly, existing platform studies have analyzed how platform companies strategically mobilize discourses to build their commercial imaginaries (Blackman and Harley, 2024), frame their social initiatives (Li and Zhang, 2025; Scharlach, 2024) or position themselves in relation to regulatory pressures (e.g. Gillespie, 2010), but have not extensively explored how they talk about environmental sustainability. Thus, we make a unique contribution to the field by studying platform companies’ discursive legitimation processes over time in a context where dominant assumptions about the legitimacy of an entire industry are changing – namely, as the ‘greenness’ of digital technology is being dismantled and the social responsibility of platform companies increasingly disputed.

By doing this, we contribute to the recent literature on the expansion of platform companies’ power into various social and political domains (e.g. Poell et al., 2022; Shapiro et al., 2024; Sharon and Gellert, 2023), which has not paid attention to platform companies’ environmental sustainability actions and discourses. Our study shows that platform companies position themselves as ‘climate leaders’ through their corporate communication. They employ environmental discourses to gain both legitimacy and competitive advantage: these discourses enhance their market power as their environmental initiatives and partnerships often translate into economic profit and expansion.

In the next section, we discuss tech platform companies as climate actors, in particular based on the literature on platform power. After that, we present the theory of discursive legitimation as our main theoretical frame to address platform companies’ communication of their environmental responsibility. After presenting our empirical materials and methods, we present our findings by showing how the platform companies discursively frame their climate actions to build their legitimacy and authority positions in their public communication.

Platform companies, climate change and power

Platform power typically refers to the economic and cultural power that a handful of private platform companies have over the internet and social action taking place on it (Burgess, 2021; Nieborg et al., 2024). Platform studies have widely explored how platforms govern our social interaction and various forms of communicative processes in society. Platform companies, as controllers of digital infrastructures, can influence the behaviour of other actors and markets by setting standards and rules (Khanal et al., 2025; Nieborg et al., 2024; Van Dijck et al., 2019). Further, in their capacity as informational intermediaries, social media platforms exercise opinion power, which enables them to command online attention and agenda, and use data and algorithmic tools for persuasion (Van Dijck and Poell, 2015).

Platform companies, however, are corporations and their power can also be addressed from this perspective. Due to their political power as immensely wealthy global corporate actors, platform companies have become increasingly important in policy processes (Gorwa et al., 2024; Khanal et al., 2025), allowing them to defend their own interests and push for or prevent a policy change by lobbying or other policy influence means. Moreover, recent scholarship has discussed platform companies’ power in terms of their expansion into new social areas due to their digital expertise and market dominance (Sharon and Gellert, 2023; Van Dijck et al., 2019). Sharon and Gellert (2023: 2653) have discussed such moves as ‘sphere transgressions’, referring to conversions of advantages based on digital expertise ‘into advantages in all spheres of society that undergo some form of digitalisation, from healthcare, to education, to agriculture’. Artificial intelligence (AI) models and applications are seen to further bolster platform companies’ power, economic growth and expansion to other social domains (Van der Vlist et al., 2024).

Business ethics literature has pointed out the critical role of MNCs in preventing the climate emergency from escalating (Shue, 2021; Umbers and Moss, 2021). However, the critical scholarship on corporate environmentalism is conflicted about their suitability for this role because of their short-term goals and reliance upon continued economic growth (e.g. Ciplet and Roberts, 2017; Wright and Nyberg, 2017). Overall, global businesses have gradually become more attentive to their environmental performance and aware of the business benefits of proactive climate change strategies, even if different business sectors respond to climate change differently, since it poses different risks and opportunities for their operations (Jaworska, 2018). Scholarship has identified several rationales for corporations to take up environmental sustainability, including increasing pressure from regulators, environmental organisations and other stakeholders, green market opportunities, avoiding regulations by voluntary action, legitimacy building and desiring a ‘climate leader’ role in climate policy (Bach, 2019).

Literature shows that corporations have responded to increasing expectations and criticism by highlighting their key role in solving environmental challenges – while at the same time justifying their actions in terms of business profits (Jaworska, 2018; Nyberg and Wright, 2016; Wright and Nyberg, 2017). For platform companies, the climate crisis has provided an opportunity to showcase their digital expertise and capacity to solve the collective problem of climate change (Papin and Beauregard, 2023) and, thereby, become self-proclaimed ‘climate leaders’. The increasing power of platform companies must be understood in the wider context of technological solutionism in which technology is promoted as a solution to a number of social problems (Morozov, 2013). The discourse of ‘digital solutionism’ (Kuntsman, 2020) is based on the idea that digital technologies and expertise are the key tools for environmental sustainability. Such discourse fails to address the environmental harms produced by these same technologies.

Digital communication inflicts significant environmental damage through energy consumption, raw materials extraction and electronic waste (Kuntsman, 2020; Velkova, 2016). Data centres consume massive amounts of energy to power and cool the servers they house and are on occasion relying on fossil energy production (Brodie, 2023; Velkova, 2016). The electricity consumed by digital devices and services contributes to unsustainable energy demand, a development accentuated by the increasing use of AI technology (Brevini, 2020). Moreover, platform companies collaborate with the fossil fuel industry (Cole, 2020), and despite their investment in renewable energy projects, their own emissions continue to rise, as does the amount of electronic waste and their role in water withdrawal (Brodie, 2023).

Discursive legitimation of platforms as sustainable actors

In approaching the relationship between environmental sustainability and the public communication of platform corporations, we turn to studies of organisational legitimacy and its discursive construction. According to the classic definition by Suchman (1995), legitimacy refers to the general perception that an organisation's actions are desirable, correct or appropriate in a particular socially constructed system of norms and values. Organisational legitimacy is thus constructed in the institutional context of the social, economic and political environment in which an organisation is embedded (Deephouse and Suchman, 2008; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). If there is a lack of legitimacy, the probability of resistance increases, and the situation typically forces the organisation to react and change. In moments of declining public trust in corporations, organisations try to morally justify their actions and existence vis-à-vis society (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011). In the middle of the growing techlash, platform companies have low socio-political legitimacy, which forces them to lean on pragmatic legitimacy (Suchman, 1995), in other words, on their abilities in solving collective problems (Papin and Beauregard, 2023). For instance, platform companies have responded to concerns by launching ‘social good’ initiatives that aim to solve major societal challenges (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021; Scharlach, 2024).

By engaging in different forms of public communication, organisations strategically use messages and mobilise specific discourses to gain societal approval and support (Reyes, 2011; Suchman, 1995; Vaara and Tienari, 2008). A discursive approach to legitimacy maintains that organisational legitimacy is constructed and shaped in linguistic resources (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005; Van Leeuwen, 2007). Studies in this field have sought to understand different discursive strategies organisations use to socially construct their legitimacy, for example, by engaging in authorisation, rationalisation or normalisation or their actions (Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997; Siltaoja, 2009; Vaara and Tienari, 2008). Through discursive legitimation, organizations aim to frame their actions as beneficial, ethical and acceptable in a given setting (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). Often, corporate communication about sustainability and responsibility has been accused of being ‘just talk’ and disconnected from actual practices of doing social good (e.g. Nyberg and Wright, 2016). Indeed, platform companies are commercial enterprises primarily motivated by private, economic interests (Scharlach, 2024; Shapiro et al., 2024; Van Dijck et al., 2019) and studies have critically examined their practices of insincere double-speak and talk-action discrepancies, particularly in the context of content moderation (e.g. De Keulenaar et al., 2023).

Finally, corporate communication can be regarded as a broader attempt to discursively construct desired realities that redefine and reform the societal role of the corporations (Christensen et al., 2013; Reyes, 2011). Building rhetorical authority constructions – that is, using rhetorical tactics to construct positions of influence (Vaara et al., 2024), such as ‘climate leadership’ – has a central role in legitimation processes. Consequently, we approach corporate blog posts as means of legitimation rather than as a reflection of platform companies’ ‘true’ accountability. Viewed from the perspective of discursive legitimacy theory, the blog texts are understood as communicative actions: they are used to legitimise actions, announce ideals and aspirations, construct desired realities and draw the limits of platform companies’ responsibility. Such talk is not just empty and aspirational with no consequences, as it may give ‘weapons’ to stakeholders to hold companies to their words (Christensen et al., 2013). Therefore, scrutinizing the discourses used is essential to understand how platform companies aim to construct and expand their power in society – as well as to hold them accountable for their publicly stated aspirations.

Data and methods

Our empirical data consists of entries in the corporate blogs or news sections (collectively referred to here as blogs) of major platform companies. The ‘Big Five’, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta (previously Facebook) and Microsoft, were selected as main providers of today's digital infrastructure. We also included Twitter (currently X) due to its significant infrastructural role as a platform for public political discussions, even if it does not have a revenue as substantial as the big five tech companies. Twitter's platform power lies in shaping public discourse and facilitating social action, while, for example, Google, Amazon and Apple affect industry strategies and standards by controlling markets.

Our data represents promotionally and positively framed corporate communication that targets different audiences, from civil society to business partners and (inter)national policymakers, to gain support and shape corporate image. While blogs and news sections’ environmental sustainability discourse involves similar viewpoints as corporate reports, they target a wider audience: they are understood to facilitate an inclusive and ‘authentic’ corporate image (Fieseler et al., 2010), also because they are written in accessible language and are often authored by named spokespersons for a corporation. Blogs and news sections account for environmental responsibility in a less formal manner than corporate reporting, which is bound by different requirements and focuses on quantitatively reporting social and environmental impacts. Blogs can be seen as a hybrid genre blending various text types related to corporate environmental communication – information about (positive) environmental sustainability activities, aspirations, advertisements, first-person experiences and interviews with employees and stakeholders – as well as to exaggeration or misrepresentation of the companies’ environmental sustainability efforts (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021). This is why they offer a broad opportunity to study how companies discursively frame their actions, responsibilities and their roles in society.

In total, our dataset included 33,946 posts published between 2005 and 2023. Reflecting their different functions and target audiences, blogs address a wide range of topics, including various socio-political and cultural issues. As we were interested in socio-political topics, the posts were initially filtered using a dictionary-based approach with keywords related to platforms’ social responsibility, such as environmental sustainability, elections and misinformation. To filter an initial subset related to environmental sustainability, we used a set of sustainability-related keywords (‘climate change’, ‘sustainability’, ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘renewable energy’, ‘emissions’, ‘greenhouse gas’, ‘recycle’, ‘recycling’, ‘water usage’, ‘waste’, ‘sdg’, ‘green’) yielded 1000 blog posts. A manual verification of post themes revealed that in 437 blog posts, environmental sustainability was the main theme. We included only these posts and disregarded those in which it was solely mentioned. Thus, our filtered and verified dataset contained 437 documents. Posts by Google (203) and Amazon (143) make up a majority of the dataset, while the remaining companies have fewer sustainability-related blog posts, reflecting differences in posting frequency. Besides posting most frequently about sustainability-related issues, Google does not differ from the other companies’ blogs in any other way. Amazon's AWS blog has a stronger business customer orientation than the others, often describing specific uses of technology for sustainability. In the analysis, we take this imbalance into account by referring to specific companies whenever results are not universally representative.

The number of blog posts discussing environmental sustainability significantly increased after 2020, which mostly reflects the overall increase in the number of blog posts over time, starting from 2016 (see Figure 1). Overall, the share of posts in which environmental sustainability is the main theme is proportionally modest, 2% on average, with a slight rising trend towards the end of our data. Moreover, there are major differences between platforms. The first blog posts that had environmental sustainability as their focus were published in 2005 by Apple and in 2006 by Google, while Amazon and Twitter published their first posts in 2019 (see Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Total volume of blog entries over time and share of posts that mention keywords related to environmental sustainability between 2005 and 2023 (before manual verification).

Figure 2.

Volume of blog entries that mention keywords related to environmental sustainability between 2005 and 2023 per platform company.

To explore how the companies constructed their legitimacy in connection with environmental sustainability, we engaged in a qualitative analysis of the posts. All 437 posts were manually coded using Atlas.ti. Initially, we coded all passages where the companies described their sustainability actions and related collaboration with other actors. Based on this coding, we categorized different types of climate activities and aspirations described (such as reducing one's own carbon footprint, supporting the sustainability of other companies, identifying new products and services to satisfy the green market, technological innovation and partnering with an environmental NGO). In the second round of analysis, we investigated these accounts of corporate climate practice with a focus on the rhetoric the companies used around these actions to discursively construct legitimacy as an environmentally responsible organisation (see Siltaoja, 2009). This included, for example, expressions of expertise and resources concerning environmental sustainability and references to environmental, social or other responsibilities they acknowledged.

This analysis highlighted a discourse of climate leadership that grew increasingly prevalent in our data. Therefore, we turned to discursive legitimation theory and adopted a focus on ways in which the companies constructed authority positions for themselves (Vaara et al., 2024) through their sustainability discourse, by asking how the companies represented their sustainability-related actions to establish them as beneficial and necessary (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999) and to bolster their leadership positions and role model authority (Van Leeuwen, 2007). We found four discursive positions through which the climate leadership discourse was constructed based on the companies’ activities and claimed expertise in a particular area: sustainability pioneer, product and service provider, partnership-builder and innovator. The data reveals uniformity among the companies in the use of these discursive roles but with different precedence and characteristics. In the final stage of the analysis we mapped the identified actions per document year in Atlas.ti, which allowed us to understand how the actions, topics and discourses had evolved over time in the companies’ corporate communication.

Findings

In our data, climate leadership was discursively constructed through four authority positions which focused on (1) sustainability of platform's own operations (authority position of corporate sustainability pioneer), (2) providing products, services and information that support the environmental sustainability of other actors (product and service provider), (3) partnering with environmental NGOs and public sector actors (partnership-builder) and (4) fostering innovation (innovator). We will first present how these authority positions contribute to the discourse of climate leadership and then discuss how they evolve over time. From the temporal perspective, we identified three periods: Greening business practices (2005–2014), Greening stakeholders (2015–2020) and Greening the Planet (2021–2023).

Becoming climate leaders

Framing themselves as climate leaders, platform companies claim to use their access to exceptional capital and resources to take greater responsibility, beyond their own environmental sustainability, to solve the climate crisis and ‘enable everyone – businesses, policy makers and consumers – to create and live in a more sustainable world’ (Google, 2 Dec 2019). Emphasis on leadership and responsibility has been the dominant framing in corporate climate change communication globally for most of the twenty-first century (Schlichting, 2013). This allows merging together business goals and societal responsibility. In their posts, the platform companies consistently frame market value and environmental value as inseparable and, thereby, legitimise their actions by referring to the benefit they bring to the society as a whole. Proactive climate action is motivated in the blog posts as a moral endeavour – being ‘the right thing to do’ (Suchman, 1995: 579) – but also by being profitable, effective, cost-saving and creating new business opportunities:

‘[A]t Google we continue to be committed to 100% renewable energy because this makes good business sense and is the right thing to do for the planet and for our users.’ (Google 2016, June 2)

Indeed, beyond the market justifications, the platform companies’ rhetorical efforts to construct authority are based on their moral responsibility and unique capabilities – the former often seen as emerging from the latter. The companies aim to garner legitimacy by depicting their actions as driven by moral responsibility. Accordingly, a recurrent theme in their posts is the responsibility to set a good example: the companies referred to their exceptional capabilities which set them apart from other (business) actors. For instance, Apple differentiated itself from the short-termism of the business world by highlighting its long-term commitment to expand its renewable energy projects in China:

‘This won’t happen overnight – in fact it will take years – but it's important work that has to happen, and Apple is in a unique position to take the initiative toward this ambitious goal. It is a responsibility we accept.’ (Apple 2015, May 11, emphasis ours)

As technology builders, it's our responsibility to make sustainable use of AI and ML. (Amazon 2022, April 27)

Under attack for their contribution to various social and environmental harms, the construction of climate leadership relied on commitments to ambitiously framed climate goals (such as reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2030), often going beyond the minimum requirements set by decision-makers and international climate agreements, and the voluntary and proactive nature of these goals. Both qualities link to the platforms’ economic and political power, and together construct a discursive position of a corporate sustainability pioneer. As Nyberg and Wright (2016) note, adopting a climate leadership position can be understood as a response to potential regulations that would curb their power and expected economic gains of climate measures. Climate leadership, then, can be seen as a strategic choice to avoid government-mandated action and further market expansion, in addition to being a response to increasing social demands for corporations to attend to climate change and environmental sustainability

Driving sustainable transition through products and services

The discursive position of product and service provider depicts platform companies as actors delivering technological solutions, products and services that help business organisations, communities and individuals achieve goals related to sustainable development. The discursive position was common in the blog posts of Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Twitter. In Apple's blog posts, the position was much less common, reflecting Apple's nature as a more consumer electronics-oriented tech company and less of a platform company. Particularly Amazon, Microsoft and Google frame themselves as providing digital products or services through which their business partners can pursue sustainability-related goals. Services and products targeted at business partners are numerous, but typically relate to reducing carbon emissions – for instance, through digital solutions that help businesses increase efficiency or monitor emissions.

We believe that Microsoft's most important contribution to carbon reduction will come not from our own work alone but by helping our customers around the world reduce their carbon footprints through our learnings and with the power of data science, artificial intelligence, and digital technology. (…) Regardless of where organizations are on their journey, we’re committed to being of help. (Microsoft 2020, January 16)

To build a better future and protect our planet, we’ll continue focused efforts that help our partners take climate action and strengthen investments in technologies to make a carbon-free world a reality. (Google 2020, September 14)

The companies construct authority by promoting novel products and services that are specifically designed for mitigating climate change – such as Google's Project Sunroof for exploring the suitability of solar power. However, in the end of the study period, core products such as cloud computing, AI and consumer devices are increasingly ascribed sustainability-enabling benefits, as the following post by Amazon illustrates:

Cloud technologies play a pivotal role in the journey toward decarbonization in the energy industry. With access to advanced data analytics and simulation tools on the cloud, energy companies are better equipped to strategize, monitor, and measure the effectiveness of carbon reduction initiatives. AWS is helping accelerate the energy transition and assisting organizations in meeting their decarbonization goals with technologies that monitor emissions, optimize energy usage, model alternative energy scenarios, and more. (Amazon 2023, December 21)

The platform companies reinforce their leadership by claiming to advocate for their business partners or business sectors (e.g. the energy industry) in their sustainability transition. In the blog posts, the companies present themselves as altruistic helpers, yet from a critical perspective, their announced goals of greening their global networks of suppliers and customers serve their business interests, as selling (or providing free) environmental-friendly products and services gives them influence over how other actors’ greening unfolds, and incentivises new companies to join their ecosystems (Van der Vlist et al., 2024).

The position of a product and service provider also concerns individual users, as platform companies exhibit their capability to offer products, services and information that help individuals pursue a greener lifestyle. This was particularly common for Meta, Google and Twitter. For instance, Meta and Twitter communicated about various ways to facilitate discussion on environmental issues on their platforms, in addition to more sporadic services, such as enabling donations to environmental causes through Facebook and Instagram. Google often emphasised the company's role as a facilitator of individual-level climate action:

[W]e committed to help 1 billion people make more sustainable choices by 2022 through Google's products and services. Recently, we shared several new ways people can use Google's products to make sustainable choices – from choosing eco-friendly routes and searching for greener flights, hotels, and appliances to supporting clean energy from home with Nest and surfacing authoritative information on climate change from sources like the United Nations. (Google 2021, October 26)

In particular, social media platform companies Meta and Twitter, along with Google, highlight their efforts to raise awareness of environmental sustainability. Here, the platform companies aim to establish legitimacy by positioning themselves as educators and mobilizers of climate action. The rhetoric of climate leadership heavily relies on their products’ role as central conveners of online attention and focuses on their abilities to inform the public (and partners in the supply chain). Importantly, the companies aim to gain legitimacy by highlighting their actions in fighting against climate mis- and disinformation – spreading on their social media platforms – and claiming to promote accurate science-based information. This happens through tools such as Meta's Climate Science Information Center, which collaborates with fact-checking organisations.

We’re helping to promote a variety of campaigns on Twitter focused on increasing environmental awareness and education, as well as working to mobilize citizens around the movement. (Twitter 2019, April 22)

We’re adding a Climate InfoFinder and Climate Science Literacy Campaign to our suite of tools, such as fact checking and labels, to help combat climate misinformation.… We’re also testing Climate Pledges in Facebook Groups to empower communities to take action against climate change with the help of expert-backed solutions. (Meta 2022, November 6)

Thus, by providing services and products to business and individuals, and by constructing their role as crucial in climate awareness and mobilization, the platform companies constitute themselves as role models (Van Leeuwen, 2007) in the sustainability transition. This position was particularly central for Amazon, which was very focused on AWS services aimed at helping other organizations pursue sustainability and climate action.

Partnering for public-spirited climate response

The second discursive and authoritative position the platform companies constructed for themselves was that of a partner. Objectives of the partnerships include not only causes traditionally associated with environmental NGOs (e.g. conservation projects, managing pollution or waste, food distribution) but also activities closely related to the platform companies’ operations. For example, the social media platforms in particular collaborate with NGOs to create awareness-raising or educational content for their platforms, as the following example shows:

We worked with youth organisations Earthrise and JUV, to develop a climate card game using Meta AR Filters, to get people talking about climate issues. (Meta 2022, November 16)

All platform companies communicated about a wide variety of public–private partnerships with public actors and non-state actors such as NGOs, foundations and research institutions. All companies have developed partnerships with the United Nations or other major humanitarian and intergovernmental agencies. These non-business partnerships allow the platform companies to discursively construct their climate leadership by representing themselves as pro bono organisers of sustainability-related initiatives, such as Google's Tech for Social Good project providing funding ‘for charitable projects focused on climate and sustainability’ (Google 2023, November 8). The public-private partnerships typically concern the platform companies providing funding, data or technical support for non-profit organisations:

Also marking 10 years is the Earth Outreach program, which gives nonprofit groups resources, tools, and inspiration to leverage the power of Google Earth and other mapping tools for their causes, Earth Outreach is now combining machine learning and cloud computing to build a living, breathing dashboard of the planet. By turning the mountains of geo-data we have into insights and knowledge, we can help guide better decision-making in local communities and at global scale. (Google 2017, October 10)

Through a collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Big Data Program (BDP), ASDI [Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative] is making available petabytes of ocean-related data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help map, monitor, and manage ocean resources and activities. (Amazon 2021, June 8)

Here, the platform companies seek to position themselves as altruistic contributors to the common good or even as humanitarian actors in the context of crisis response. However, as such partnerships seek to digitise non-profit actors’ operations, they can be seen as justifying a techno-solutionist approach to climate change and building relationships of dependency. Through increased visibility, ‘social good’ initiatives allow authority construction and branding opportunities, as well as access to new markets and data (Madianou, 2019). Moreover, such partnerships may be used to justify the large-scale data gathering platform companies engage in. Perhaps most importantly, they allow the companies to construct their authority by referring to other actors with institutional authority in the field of sustainability (Van Leeuwen, 2007).

Further, as the companies discursively build their climate leadership, they also construct authority in environmental politics by publishing their commitments for ‘partnering with governments around the world’ (Google 2021, April 5), policy visions and pushing for more ambitious regulations, typically in the context of renewable energy subsidies or standards. The companies indicated their support for ‘effective’, ‘flexible’ or ‘strong’ policies, which refer to quick regulation that supports market-led innovation and also considers economic aspects of sustainability. Google, for instance, highlights the collaboration between the private sector and ‘effective’ climate policies in tackling climate change:

The science tells us that tackling climate change is an urgent global priority. We believe the private sector, in partnership with policy leaders, must take bold steps and that we can do so in a way that leads to growth and opportunity. And we have a responsibility to do so – to our users and the environment. (Google 2016, December 6)

Lastly, attempts to construct authority through partnerships can also be seen from the perspective of the platforms’ expansion into new areas (Sharon and Gellert, 2023). First, partnerships provide legitimacy for increasing the scope of activity. Through partnerships we see an expansion from the energy sector to other sustainability sectors such as agriculture, recycling, water management, restoration and weather forecasting. For instance, Apple announced in 2016 that it is ‘also partnering with the World Wildlife Fund in China to transition up to one million acres of forest into responsible management by 2020’ (November 14). Second, discourses on the partnerships also work to pave the platform companies for a role as benevolent actors of global climate governance:

The Asia-Pacific region – particularly its low-lying and small island countries – is exceptionally vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, whether it be heat waves, rising sea levels or loss of biodiversity. …Supported by Google.org and Asian Development Bank, the $$3 million fund will be allocated between 13 local sustainability organizations helping vulnerable and underserved communities in the region. (Google 2023, March 30)

While the platform companies’ blog posts are predominantly focused on their business operations in developed Western countries, public-private partnerships provide them discursive opportunities to expand their geopolitical role by addressing critical questions related to climate vulnerable countries in the Global South and, more broadly, the inequality at the core of the climate crisis.

Facilitating climate-related technological innovation

The third discursive position of the innovator focuses on the platforms’ ongoing action in creating new technologies, methods and products that are imperative for solving present and future challenges related to sustainable development. This position receives increasing attention during the last years of the study period, as big tech works to entrench their infrastructural power within the emerging AI ecosystem (see Van der Vlist et al., 2024). The blog posts discuss, on the one hand, innovation within the platform companies and, on the other hand, promoting innovation outside the companies by advocating and investing in startup accelerators, grants, contests and research projects. Renewable energy is touted as the main target of investments throughout the entire study period, but sustainability-related startups and technological development gain increasing attention in the 2020s. Technological innovation for sustainability is a key theme for Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft and less so for the social media companies Meta and Twitter. They also, however, saw collaboration as a key for effective climate action:

We believe that by collaborating to find technologies with the greatest long-term carbon removal potential and helping them scale, we can help accelerate the solutions needed to meet global climate goals. (Meta 2022, April 12)

While the environmental sustainability discourse of the platform companies is, overall, an illustration of digital solutionism, the discursive position of an innovator particularly epitomises the perceived omnipotence of technological expert knowledge. The future-orientated innovator position contributes to organisations’ legitimation by presenting pragmatist visions in which they are socially indispensable experts with potential to solve complex problems (see Nyberg and Wright, 2016; Reyes, 2011). The rhetoric of Apple, for instance, is an example of future-oriented construction of authority by setting ambitious goals that will – ‘one day’ – benefit the planet and future generations, in addition to securing their products as foundational for innovations:

‘Apple is committed to advancing technologies that are good for the planet and help protect it for generations to come,’ said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. ‘We are proud to be part of this ambitious new project, and look forward to one day being able to use aluminum produced without direct greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacturing of our products.’ (Apple 2018, May 10)

Like in other discursive positions, the platform companies’ attempts to construct authority are based on both public and market values: as innovators, platform companies envision a market-based green transition and themselves as investors in public goods. Research on the relationship between neoliberalism and climate inaction suggests that underinvestment by the public sector in decarbonisation serves to increase the power of the private sector in environmental decision-making and market-based solutions to the climate crisis (Fremstad and Paul, 2022). In the blog posts, the companies’ expert knowledge and market position were foregrounded as effectively leading to a sustainable future or even to a ‘systemic change’:

Solving our planet's carbon issues will require technology that does not exist today. That's why a significant part of our endeavor involves putting Microsoft's balance sheet to work to stimulate and accelerate the development of carbon removal technology. (Microsoft 2020, January 16)

At Google, we want to support efforts to create a circular economy and build a sustainable future without waste. (Google 2022, October 3)

As Tuan et al. (2024) note, climate change, as well as other complex social responsibility issues, tends to be addressed by organizations as future problems. The future-oriented aspirational language signals a commitment to action with a potential for change, as both examples above show – but without a guarantee that the aspirations for change will be fulfilled.

Evolution of the environmental discourse: three periods

Our data reveals how all of the studied platform companies adopted leadership rhetoric during the study period and how it evolves and expands. We identified three periods over 18 years (2005–2023) in the evolution of the platform companies’ discursive legitimation (Table 1). These periods represent overlapping stages in how platform companies aim to establish legitimacy through public communication by positioning themselves as crucial climate actors. The three periods reflect a broader trend, applicable to all companies, that we were able to observe in analyzing the evolution of dominant types of environmental discourse throughout the study period. The nature of the trend is cumulative rather than simply changing – the dominant discourses of previous periods remain present in later periods alongside new discourses.

While in the first period, the companies’ discourse centred around the sustainability of their own operations, in the second and third periods, the discourse shifted its focus to encompass the sustainability of other stakeholders, and, ultimately, the society at large. The following two Microsoft blog posts, separated by 10 years, encapsulate this widening engagement with climate action and perceived position as climate leader:

Working on the issues of energy use and environmental change provides another opportunity to make a difference in the world. It's the right thing to do. And it's also an opportunity to promote positive change, as the world transitions to new ways of using energy and managing natural resources. That's why today, Microsoft is taking a significant step to further reduce our environmental footprint. (2012, May 8)

Our goal isn’t just to become more sustainable though, we want to help every organization on the planet to do the same. Organizations around the world need to transition to a net zero, environmentally sustainable future in a short period of time, and our partners are leveraging the Microsoft cloud, Cloud for Sustainability, data and AI to build innovative applications, solutions and services to help customers transform their operations, products, services and supply chains, to facilitate their transition to net zero, and achieve their sustainability goals. (2022, April 21)

In the first period, Greening business practices (2005–2014), platform companies focused on their own carbon footprints and environmental sustainability. More than half of the posts from this period discussed investing in and using renewable energy. Their climate leadership, then, was built on their ambitious corporate sustainability practices. In the second period, Greening stakeholders (2015–2020), climate leadership is built on an increasingly diverse range of sustainability-related actions, and the companies increasingly highlighted the wider impact of their products, services and partnerships for the sustainability transition in business and societies, even if the focus was still on companies’ own emissions and transition towards renewable energy. In the third period, Greening the Planet (2021–2023), there was a sharp increase in posts discussing how platform companies can take the lead and support the sustainability of other actors, other businesses particularly: more than three-quarters of the posts addressed sustainability-related business partnerships. These posts constructed the platforms as role models and crucial supporters of other actors’ green transition.

Moreover, the position of innovator gained a strong foothold in the third period as platform companies, especially Google, Microsoft and Amazon, discussed AI technologies as future solutions to the climate crisis, thereby fortifying their position as leaders in climate change initiatives. Over time, we observed an increase in the use of future-oriented language. Initially, in the first period, the focus was predominantly on current or past environmental initiatives. In the second period, and especially in the third period, companies began to use more future-oriented language. This language encompasses both concrete goals, such as achieving net zero, and abstract promises, like the vision that renewable energy and technological innovations, particularly AI, will help solve the climate crisis. Thus, their future visions have become more ambitious, highlighting a broader societal impact.

The expansion of platforms’ environmental sustainability actions and partnerships, together with the increasing volume of posts addressing environmental sustainability (Figure 1 and Figure 2) illustrates the platforms’ increasing efforts to acquire legitimacy as climate actors. We link this development to the evolving norms and expectations related to climate awareness that represents a constant source of pressure for the corporations: the rising public concern over climate change (Pew Research Center, 2022) and framing of the climate change as an emergency among scientists, political actors and journalists (Feldman and Hart, 2021).

The beginning of the second period coincides with the 2015 Paris Agreement which, together with the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, has been key in popularizing net zero targets that have since become ubiquitous in the climate action of both the private and the public sectors (Hale et al., 2022). The third period is characterised by platforms’ increasingly proactive and extensive talk on climate action. It coincides with growing social and political concerns over climate change, prompting companies to increasingly present themselves as providers of climate ‘solutions’ (Wright and Nyberg, 2024), which is also clearly visible in our data during the third period. We suspect this is due to the global development that governments and international organisations have increasingly turned to the private sector to address the climate crisis (Wright et al., 2024). Corporate climate engagement has also notably expanded in companies that perceive climate change as a market opportunity, which is also shown in the increasing solutionist discourse by the platform companies (Wright and Nyberg, 2024).

Table 1.

Summary of platform companies environmental discourses over time.

	2005–2014: Greening business practices (41 posts)	2015–2020: Greening stakeholders (113 posts)	2021–2023: Greening the planet (283 posts)
Discursive positions (order of prominence)	Corporate sustainability pioneer Frequently used: All companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft)	Corporate sustainability pioneer All companies Product/service provider (Google, Meta, Microsoft) Partner (Google, Apple) Innovator (Google, Apple)	Product/service provider (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter) Corporate sustainability pioneer All companies Partner All companies Innovator (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft)
Climate leadership	Built on corporate sustainability, commitments to ambitious climate goals, emphasising the combined business and social benefits	Built on an increasingly diverse range of climate action, focus expanding to include other actors alongside corporate sustainability	Primarily built on a focus on other actors and the impact on the society at large, highlighting AI and other innovations as solutions to the climate crisis

Discussion

This study analysed platform companies’ consolidating discourses of environmental responsibility and the ways in which they aimed to legitimise themselves as authoritative climate actors amid growing awareness of the climate crisis as well as the growing attention pointed to the role of digital technologies in the climate crisis. This study contributes to platform studies by creating an understanding of how the platforms companies seek to construct their legitimacy through engaging in environmental sustainability activities and by mobilizing environmental discourses to construct authority positions for themselves. Given their social and political power, it is essential to track how platform companies build their ‘climate leadership’ over time as yet another aspect on which to bolster their societal importance. In light of our findings, it is evident that the platforms have adopted environmental sustainability discourses as an element to establish the field of their social responsibility, but also to expand their power positions, as seen, for example, in how the platforms frame AI systems as a solution for the climate crisis.

We identified four discursive positions – corporate sustainability pioneer, product and service provider, partner and innovator – through which climate leadership was constructed. The climate leadership discourse was based on the expertise and exceptional capabilities the platform companies envisioned themselves possessing. First, all platform companies positioned themselves as role models (Van Leeuwen, 2007) by setting ambitious goals, taking proactive climate action and helping other actors engage in environmental sustainability. Second, the platform companies attempted to establish authority as climate leaders by highlighting their altruistic partnerships and joint initiatives with policymakers, NGOs, industry actors and communities. Third, their climate leadership stemmed from their technological expertise, which enabled them to shape understanding of available solutions to the climate crisis. Overall, the platforms envisioned themselves as climate actors who were able to see the ‘big picture’ encompassing ecological, social, economic and political aspects of climate action.

We add to the few existing longitudinal studies (e.g. Wright and Nyberg, 2017) on corporate environmental sustainability and to the even smaller number of studies that specifically look at digital platform companies (e.g. Brodie, 2024; Laaksonen et al., 2025; Pasek et al., 2023; Vrikki, 2024). Our longitudinal approach allowed us to see changes over time as the companies responded to emerging environmental awareness and to developments in the market of digital technologies and adapted their corporate responsibility discourses accordingly. Wright and Nyberg (2017) showed how corporate environmental concerns normalize and turn into mundane concerns over time. Quite contrary, the platform companies’ environmental initiatives and related discourses expanded and grew more ambitious over time, which reflects their growing aspirations to gain economic advantage in green transition (see Brodie, 2024) and highlights the powerful positions and dependencies they seek to build also in novel spheres (see Sharon and Gellert, 2023).

Our analysis shows, not surprisingly, that platform companies focused on a solution-centred discourse and rarely communicated the manifold environmental harms related to their actions. For instance, the environmental costs of AI and other emerging technologies are missing from the platforms’ solution-centred discourse (Brevini, 2020). Another discrepancy is that the same platforms that promote their efforts to facilitate pro-environment collective action and science-based information have been ineffective in battling climate misinformation (Wright, 2022) and are collaborating with fossil industry (Cole, 2020). Thus, while platform companies’ unique capacity for technological innovation is invoked as a solution to climate change, they are also complicit in causing the very problems they are promising to solve.

Based on our data, the platform companies seem to foreground the idea of constant economic growth as a common good in reference to serving local and global communities (see also Brodie, 2024), as seen in the much-used corporate slogan ‘good for both the planet and business’. Platform companies’ blurring boundaries between ‘giving’ and business profit has been seen to have an effect on the model of corporate social responsibility, inspiring a more market-oriented approach (Manning et al., 2020). In their public communication, unregulated voluntary action is accentuated. Therefore, the climate leadership model they propagate suggests a neoliberal form of climate governance, which previous research (e.g. Ciplet and Roberts, 2017; Fremstad and Paul, 2022) has identified as an obstacle for meaningful climate action (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2023). Only the circular economy promoted in Google's posts referred to a potential change in business practices; a solution that is seen as ‘pain free’ and distracting from the need for substantial changes in corporate behaviour. As Brodie (2024) points out, big tech companies are building the extractivist infrastructures of green capitalism behind their managed green discourses. Future research should pay attention to how platform companies’ climate strategies and communication are affected by evolving social and political circumstances. One could argue that the corporate aspirations of ‘greening the planet’ emerging during the final period in our analysis are already seeing signs of disruption. In recent years, AI has led to massive increases in platform companies’ energy demand and CO2 emissions while also exacerbating environmental issues related to water and raw materials (Brevini, 2023; NewClimate Institute, 2025). In light of AI energy demand, platform companies’ current net zero targets and climate strategies ‘appear to have lost their meaning and relevance’ (NewClimate Institute, 2025: 7), and the companies have publicly emphasized increased challenges related to achieving their climate goals (Milmo, 2024). During the second Trump administration, U.S. tech companies have embraced policies aimed at expanding fossil fuel production to power data centers (Halper, 2025).

Nevertheless, platform companies hold multifaceted potential at a global scale to contribute to the mitigation of emissions and the effects of climate change through their infrastructural power and cutting-edge technologies, as well as by providing spaces for sharing information and facilitating collective action. The companies hold power to shape social action – be it encouraging sustainable climate action or mainstreaming unsustainable digital consumption. So far, the platform companies have mostly picked their areas of responsibility to fit their existing business priorities. As our analysis implies, they are more focused on mobilizing rhetoric that incorporates environmental sustainability into their overarching ambitions of expanding their leadership positions. Only the third and final period of our data showed some signs of more global approaches related to climate justice, but even those were formulated through the economically viable viewpoint of technological solutionism, highlighting market-based solutions to the climate crisis as typical of the neoliberal climate governance (e.g. Fremstad and Paul, 2022). While platform companies are perhaps not walking the talk at the moment, it can be argued that their environmental communication offers their critics more tools to hold them accountable (Christensen et al., 2013). By providing a longitudinal overview of how the platforms’ climate leadership discourses have evolved and how they are used in strategic ways to expand their power, our study also contributes to this wider endeavour.

Footnotes

Ethical considerations

There are no human participants in this article and informed consent is not required.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: The Research Council of Finland [grant number 332751], The Strategic Research Council, within the Research Council of Finland [grant number 352557].

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability

ORCID iDs

Mervi Pantti

Salla-Maaria Laaksonen

Elis Karell

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