Is there a consensus gap on climate change in South America? Evidence from sentiment analysis in social networks

FERNANDO ANTONIO IGNACIO GONZÁLEZ

ECOLOGÍA AUSTRAL

ASOCIACIÓN ARGENTINA DE ECOLOGÍA

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2020 vol. 30 p. 260 - 267

0327-5477

This work investigates the possible existence of a consensus gap between scientific evidence and majority public perception, related to climate change in South America. Text mining techniques were used to extract georeferenced data from the social network Twitter during September and October of 2019. The selected text is classified from two classifiers such as the naive Bayesian classifier and the vector support machines classifier. Both classification algorithms have high accuracy rates (>80%). The results suggest the absence of a consensus gap in the case of South America, at present. This gap seems to be restricted to the case of countries like the United States. In South America, 86% to 95% of all tweets was classified as positive (believes that climate change is real).