Comparing Social Media and News Articles on Climate Change: Different Viewpoints Revealed

Abstract

Climate change is a constant threat to human life, and it is important to understand the public perception of this issue. Previous studies examining climate change have been based on limited survey data. In this study, the authors used big data such as news articles and social media data, within which the authors selected specific keywords related to climate change. Using these natural language data, topic modeling was performed for discourse analysis regarding climate change based on various topics. In addition, before applying topic modeling, sentiment analysis was adjusted to discover the differences between discourses on climate change. Through this approach, discourses of positive and negative tendencies were classified. As a result, it was possible to identify the tendency of each document by extracting key words for the classified discourse. This study aims to prove that topic modeling is a useful methodology for exploring discourse on platforms with big data. Moreover, the reliability of the study was increased by performing topic modeling in consideration of objective indicators (i.e., coherence score, perplexity). Theoretically, based on the social amplification of risk framework (SARF), this study demonstrates that the diffusion of the agenda of climate change in public news media leads to personal anxiety and fear on social media.