Exploring Climate Change Discourse: Measurements and Analysis of Reddit Data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Reddit discussions on climate change from 2014 to 2022, characterizing data, examining user engagement, and identifying key topics and entities to understand social discourse on this critical issue.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive data-driven analysis of climate change discussions on Reddit, including characterization, engagement metrics, and topic insights, covering multiple years and subreddits.

Findings

Distribution of posts and authors across years

Trends in user engagement metrics

Main topics and referenced entities in discussions

Abstract

Social media is very popular for facilitating conversations about important topics and bringing forth insights and issues related to these topics. Reddit serves as a platform that fosters social interactions and hosts engaging discussions on a wide array of topics, thus forming narratives around these topics. One such topic is climate change. There are extensive discussions on Reddit about climate change, indicating high interest in its various aspects. In this paper, we explore 11 subreddits that discuss climate change for the duration of 2014 to 2022 and conduct a data-driven analysis of the posts on these subreddits. We present a basic characterization of the data and show the distribution of the posts and authors across our dataset for all years. Additionally, we analyze user engagement metrics like scores for the posts and how they change over time. We also offer insights into the topics of discussion across the subreddits, followed by entities referenced throughout the dataset.