13 years of change? Exploring the climate change debate on Reddit through topic modeling

Abstract

A growing body of academic literature analyses the public climate change debate carried out on social media platforms. As most studies focused on Twitter/X, little is known about long-term developments on other platforms, despite their popularity. The present study addresses this by analyzing a 13-year timespan during which five million posts and comments discussing climate change were published on Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms in anglophone countries. Through topic modeling (LDA) and subsequent analyses, the main themes of discussion, the most popular communities, and changes over time are examined to describe the climate change debate on Reddit as well as how it relates to the general public debate and that on other platforms. The debate populates thousands of subreddit communities, and several recurring themes were found, discussing climate change in relation to environmental impact, scientific evidence, politics, and the economy, as well as extreme weather events. Similar to evidence from news media and other social media, the results attest to growing attention to the debate, while also noting how it becomes increasingly intertwined with political day-to-day business and popular discourse. This politicization is also evident in the dependence on mostly political events to generate and sustain significant levels of attention. Meanwhile, discussions pertaining to climate justice appear only marginally in the dominant themes.