Public discourse on environmental pollution & health in Korea: Tweets following the Fukushima nuclear accident

Abstract

Public discourse on environmental and health issues has risen on social media. Upon an environmental crisis, various chatters such as breaking news, misinformation, and rumor could aggravate social confusion and proliferate negative public sentiment. In an effort to study public sentiments on environmental issues in South Korea, we analyzed 158,964 tweets generated over a 4-year period following the Fuku- shima accident in 2011, the largest release of radioactivity to environment in recent history. This event led to a significant increase in public's interest on environmental and nuclear issues in Korea. We employed Bayesian network and recursive partitioning to observe the classification regression tree structure of major topics. Topics on health and environment were interlinked closely and represented both apprehension and concern about health threats and pollution. Our methodology helps analyze large online discourse efficiently and offers insight to crisis response organizations.