Wind energy: Influencing the dynamics of the public opinion formation through the retweet network

Abstract

Wind power is one of the primary renewable sources that are getting increasing support as a means of addressing climate changes. The debate on its use takes place on social media as a fast and unfiltered forum to express one’s opinions. In this paper, we analyse the discussion concerning wind power coming up on Twitter. We measure the influence of opinions (and of the twitterers expressing them) by building a retweet network. A strong concentration of retweets is observed through the use of both the retweet distribution and the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index (HHI): the discussion appears to be driven by a handful of twitterers who are heavily retweeted. We provide a classification of such top influencers by their role in society. A single climate activist is, by far, the top influencer. International and governmental agencies come second, and energy consultants come third. Companies play quite a minor role, on a par with generalist individual twitterers, while scientists are the least-retweeted category. Those top influencers are also constantly present from month to month, while the overwhelming majority of twitterers change from month to month. Leading energy-related events appear to have a short-lived influence on the discussion (two weeks after their taking place).