The Role of Science in the Climate Change Discussions on Reddit

2025-02-07

AI Summary

This study investigates the citation patterns, temporal evolution, and sociopolitical correlates of scientific sources in climate-related discussions on Reddit (2008–2022). Employing large-scale longitudinal web crawling, domain-level source classification (scientific/media/social), user-level political ideology annotation, and statistical modeling, it provides the first systematic quantification of scientific information’s role in sustained climate discourse on social media. Results reveal that scientific links constitute a minimal share of references (4.0% in posts; 6.5% in comments), with only gradual recent growth—concentrated among center-left users. Social sources peaked in 2019–2020, while scientific links were rarely deployed to counter misinformation, indicating a lack of corrective function. The analysis uncovers three critical challenges: low public engagement with scientific content, structural imbalance in source diversity, and politicized instrumentalization of scientific information. These findings offer empirical grounding for designing more effective science communication strategies in polarized digital environments.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation

Abstract

Collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public's understanding of the relevant scientific findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. These links are dwarfed, however, by the citations of mass media, newspapers, and social media, the latter of which peaked especially during 2019-2020. Further, scientific sources are more likely to be posted by users who also post links to sources having central-left political leaning, and less so by those posting more polarized sources. Unfortunately, scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources.

Problem

• Analyze scientific source usage
• Study Reddit climate discussions
• Assess public scientific understanding

Innovation

• Analyzed Reddit climate discussions
• Tracked scientific source citations
• Identified political bias links