Twitter data analysis to assess the interest of citizens on the impact of marine plastic pollution

Few studies have mined social media platforms to assess environmental concerns. In this study, Twitter was scraped to obtain a ~140,000 tweet dataset related specifically to marine plastic pollution. The goal is to understand what kind of users profiles are tweeting and how and when they do it. In a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Otero, Pablo, Gago, Jesús, Quintas, Patricia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/324013
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/324013
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Twitter
Social media
Marine litter
Plastic pollution
Topic modelling
COVID-19
data processing
pollution
Social behaviour
Litter
Plastic debris
fish
marine pollution
litter
radio
acquisition
Descripción
Sumario:Few studies have mined social media platforms to assess environmental concerns. In this study, Twitter was scraped to obtain a ~140,000 tweet dataset related specifically to marine plastic pollution. The goal is to understand what kind of users profiles are tweeting and how and when they do it. In addition, topic modelling and graph theory techniques have allowed us to identify main concerns on this topic: i) impact on wildlife, ii) microplastics/water pollution, iii) estimates/reports, iv) legislation/protection, and v) recycling/cleaning initiatives. Results reveal a scarce influence of organizations involved in research and marine environmental awareness, so some guidelines are depicted that could help to adjust their communication plans. This is relevant to engage society through reliable information, change habits and reinforce sustainable behaviour. A visualization tool has been created to analyze the results over time.