Prediction and Analysis of Sentiments of Reddit Users towards the Climate Change Crisis

Climate crisis is one of the most talked about issues in the world today. In spite of a global agreement on the necessity to protect the earth from global warming, people still lack awareness on the graveness of the situation. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and others offer immense opportunities for people to become vocal and participate with their opinions and thoughts on these practical challenges by exchanging information and talking about them. By looking at their attitudes and the issues they discuss, it is possible to determine in this research how users of Reddit, one of the most well-known and popular social media platforms in the world, feel about climate change. Retrieved comments and posts are classified into two sentiment classes: Positive and Negative. To understand the sentiments, we find sentiment targets by comparing two neural networks CNN and RNN and using the more accurate model to predict sentiments of the comments in the test dataset and analyse the nature of climate change discussion over time. Although the computational maximal accuracy for the two models is comparable, it was discovered that the CNN model scored marginally better than the RNN in terms of average precision, average accuracy, and average loss. The examination of Reddit users’ opinions demonstrates that the general attitude is negative, particularly when people acknowledge extreme weather events that have the potential to impact the public wellbeing framework.