A Fine-Grained Analysis of Public Opinion toward Chinese Technology Companies on Reddit

TL;DR

This study analyzes public opinion on Chinese tech companies on Reddit, revealing sentiment disparities, topic differences, and the influence of political events on perceptions using advanced NLP techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of Reddit comments on Chinese tech firms, employing transformer-based sentiment classification and topic modeling to uncover nuanced public opinions.

Findings

Positive comments constitute 8.42%, negative comments 14.12%.

Positive comments focus on consumer products like smartphones and laptops.

Negative comments cover criticism of platforms, data security, and political issues.

Abstract

In the face of the growing global influence and prevalence of Chinese technology companies, governments worldwide have expressed concern and mistrust toward these companies. There is a scarcity of research that specifically examines the widespread public response to this phenomenon on a large scale. This study aims to fill in the gap in understanding public opinion toward Chinese technology companies using Reddit data, a popular news-oriented social media platform. We employ the state-of-the-art transformer model to build a reliable sentiment classifier. We then use LDA to extract the topics associated with positive and negative comments. We also conduct content analysis by studying the changes in the semantic meaning of the companies' names over time. Our main findings include the following: 1) Notable difference exists in the proportions of positive comments (8.42%) and negative comments (14.12%); 2) Positive comments are mostly associated with the companies' consumer products, such as smartphones, laptops, and wearable electronics. Negative comments have a more diverse topic distribution (notable topics include criticism toward the platform, dissatisfaction with the companies' smartphone products, companies' ties to the Chinese government, data security concerns, 5G construction, and general political discussions); and 3) Characterization of each technology company is usually centered around a particular predominant theme related to the company, while real-world political events may trigger drastic changes in users' characterization.