Understanding Environmental Posts: Sentiment and Emotion Analysis of Social Media Data

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Social media is now the predominant source of information due to the availability of immediate public response. As a result, social media data has become a valuable resource for comprehending public sentiments. Studies have shown that it can amplify ideas and influence public sentiments. This study analyzes the public perception of climate change and the environment over a decade from 2014 to 2023. Using the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) algorithm, we identify sentiment and explore prevailing emotions expressed within environmental tweets across various social media platforms, namely Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. Accuracy on a human-annotated dataset was 0.65, higher than Vader's score but lower than that of an expert rater (0.90). Our findings suggest that negative environmental tweets are far more common than positive or neutral ones. Climate change, air quality, emissions, plastic, and recycling are the most discussed topics on all social media platforms, highlighting its huge global concern. The most common emotions in environmental tweets are fear, trust, and anticipation, demonstrating the wide and complex nature of public reactions. By identifying patterns and trends in opinions related to the environment, we hope to provide insights that can help raise awareness regarding environmental issues, inform the development of interventions, and adapt further actions to meet environmental challenges.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Access
Volume12
Pages (from-to)33504-33523
Number of pages20
ISSN2169-3536
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 07.03.2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.

    Research areas

  • climate change, emotion analysis, global warming, pointwise mutual information, public perception, Reddit, Sentiment analysis, social media, Twitter, YouTube
  • Informatics
  • Business informatics

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