Public microblogging on climate change: One year of Twitter worldwide

Abstract

Public perceptions of climate change are traditionally measured through surveys. The exploding popularity of social networks, however, presents a new opportunity to research the spatiotemporal pattern of public discourse in relation to natural and/or socio-economic events. Among the social networks, Twitter is one of the largest microblogging services. The architecture of Twitter makes the question “what's happening?” the cornerstone of information exchange. This inspired the notion of using Twitter users as distributed sensors, which has been successfully employed in both the natural and social sciences. In 2012 and 2013, we collected 1.8 million tweets on “climate change” and “global warming” in five major languages (English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish). We discuss the geography of tweeting, weekly and daily patterns, major news events that affected tweeting on climate change, changes in the central topics of discussion over time, the most authoritative traditional media, blogging, and the most authoritative organizational sources of information on climate change referenced by Twitter users in different countries. We anticipate that social network mining will become a major source of data in the public discourse on climate change.