Community Sentiment on Environmental Topics in Social Networks

We monitor social media, Twitter in particular, on a broad range of environmental issues such as climate change, green energy, sustainable development, climate policy targets. We analyze the social network of retweets about specific issues and we identify the influential users. We then characterize influential communities based on the prevalence of discussion topics in the tweet texts. As a novel and important aspect of our research, we also classify communities based on the prevalent sentiment with respect to the various discussion topics. We find differences among the major communities in their sentiment leanings towards various environmental issues.