Berlin 2024 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 21: Computational Social Science
SOE 21.2: Talk
Thursday, March 21, 2024, 17:15–17:30, MA 001
Structure and dynamics of climate change contrarianism on Reddit — •Armin Pournaki1,2,3, Jean-Philippe Cointet2, Thierry Poibeau3, Jürgen Jost1, and Eckehard Olbrich1 — 1Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig — 2médialab, SciencesPo, Paris — 3Laboratoire Lattice, Paris
Even though scientific consensus on the human effects on climate change is established, there exists a growing contrarian movement that aims to reduce the consideration of climate change for policy making. This work aims to shed light on the argumentation patterns observed in everyday discussions of climate contrarians on the social media platform Reddit. Using an existing transformer-based text classifier trained on hand-annotated paragraphs of contrarian claims (Coan et al. 2021), we show that the most frequently encountered claims against climate change in this space are 1) attacks against the climate movement, 2) attacks against climate science and 3) questioning the effect of human impact on global warming. These patterns are stable over time. Computing the entropy of users' claim distributions and embedding them into a lower-dimensional argument space, we show that many Redditors adopt a variety of (sometimes incompatible) arguments and that the above mentioned top claims constitute the main argumentative axes that divide discussions in the subreddit r/climateskeptics. Finally, we investigate the role of influencers and show that the majority of the content discussed is generated by a small number of highly active accounts who predominantly push content that directly attacks the climate movement and scientists.
Keywords: climate change; reddit; natural language processing