Haoqi Shi’s research while affiliated with University of Waterloo and other places

Climate action is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We contribute to this effort by analyzing climate change topics on the Reddit social curation platform, which contains over 100,000 discussion communities. We leverage the community-oriented structure of Reddit to answer two questions: 1) Which online communities discuss climate change? and 2) What do they discuss? In addition to the presence of groups of activists and skeptics, we find climate change discussions on question-answering and opinion-sharing communities, as well as in a community for teenagers. We then run a topic modeling algorithm on the five largest climate change communities. We find concerns about skeptics, political policies doubting the severity of climate change and the consequences of climate change, as well as discussions of climate actions that can be taken by individuals. Finally, an analysis of the URLs mentioned in discussions highlights influential content creators and underscores the need to avoid misinformation on these sources.