Discussion of Climate Change on Reddit: Polarized Discourse or Deliberative Debate?

This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: The data used in this study is from two publicly available datasets on bigquery: the fh-bigquery:reddit_posts project available at bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts, and the fh-bigquery:reddit_comments project available at: bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments. The data was accessed on 05/02/2019.Studies of climate discourse on social media platforms often find evidence of polarization, echo chambers, and misinformation. However, the literature’s overwhelming reliance on Twitter makes it difficult to understand whether these phenomena generalize across other social media platforms. Here we present the first study to examine climate change discourse on Reddit, a popular – yet understudied – locus for climate debate. This contributes to the literature through expansion of the empirical base for the study of online communication about climate change beyond Twitter. Additionally, platform architecture of Reddit differs from many social media platforms in several ways which might impact the quality of the climate debate. We investigate this through topic modeling, community detection, and analysis of sources of information on a large corpus of Reddit data from 2017. Evidence of polarization is found through the topics discussed and sources of information shared. Yet, while some communities are dominated by particular ideological viewpoints, others are more suggestive of deliberative debate. We find little evidence for the presence of polarized echo chambers in the network structure on Reddit. These findings challenge our understanding of social media discourse around climate change and suggest that platform architecture plays a key role in shaping climate debate online.University of ExeterLeverhulme TrustEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC