Increasing yet diverse interests in EV across different Reddit communities

A new research based on over 3 million posts on Reddit over the 10 years shows a dramatic increase in the public interest in EVs and reveals a wide spectrum of viewpoints that the public is interested in EVs. Topics, sentiments are scrutinized to explore the public perception of EVs based on the large-scale dataset. The analysis of online communities (i.e., subreddits) surprisingly show a high similarity between certain political community (r/The_Donald) and fringe communities (r/conspiracy, r/unpopularopinions). 

 

FINDINGS

A recent study based on a long-term Reddit dataset by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder reveals how the online communities perceive electric vehicles (EVs) over the past decade.

 

The study is available on June 18, 2022, in Communications in Transportation Research. (DOI 10.1016/j.commtr.2022.100070)

 

The researchers found that many different types of communities have been involved in the discussions of EVs. An exponentially increasing number of EV-related posts and a lot of different topics can be found on Reddit, such as environmental impacts, EV policies, brand choices/comparisons, charging infrastructures, and so on. Interestingly, specific political subreddit (r/The_Donald) have a highly similar pattern with fringe communities, such as r/collapse, r/unpopularopinion, and r/conspiracy, in both sentiment and topic aspects.

 

MOTIVATION

Previous studies that analyze the public perception of EVs were mostly based on questionnaires, surveys, or interviews. Those studies are valuable but they always have the limitations of insufficient research samples, relatively shorter time period, and unsuspected or unassessed biases of the Hawthorne effect (where respondents behave differently because they know they are being observed by researchers). Therefore, we aim to approach this question from a different perspective, which utilizes the long-term, large-scale, and spontaneous discussions on the popular Reddit social platform.

 

METHOD

Over 3.4 million EV-related Reddit posts from 2011 to 2020 were collected in the study. Natural language processing techniques, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis, are utilized to analyze the corpus. The specific online communities, called subreddits, were also analyzed. Based on their sentiment distribution toward EVs, and their concentration on different topics, the researchers calculated how similar/different the perception patterns are among the subreddits.

 

IMPACT

 

This study reveals the feasibility of utilizing the spontaneous online social network (OSN) data to explore the public perception of electric vehicles over a long time and demonstrates a much wider spectrum of viewpoints that the public is interested in than that of previous studies. Similar methodologies can be applied to other topics in energy or transportation research, such as photovoltaic systems, hydrogen vehicles, etc. Meanwhile, this work can serve as a starting point for more analysis bringing about practical implications in future work. For example, various types of communities, such as political subreddits and financial subreddits, have active discussions on EVs, and more detailed analysis can be performed in these identified communities by experts in corresponding fields.

 

The highly similar perception pattern among the r/The_Donald and the fringe communities is very surprising. Those communities have much interest in climate-related topics when discussing EVs, which may indicate the existence of controversial opinions on the environmental impacts of EVs among those subreddits.

 

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Communications in Transportation Research publishes peer-reviewed high-quality research representing important advances of significance to emerging transport systems. The mission is to provide fair, fast, and expert peer review to authors and insightful theories, impactful advances, and interesting discoveries to readers. We welcome submissions of significant and general topics, of inter-disciplinary nature (transport, civil, control, artificial intelligence, social science, psychological science, medical services, etc.), of complex and inter-related system of systems, of strong evidence of data strength, of visionary analysis and forecasts towards the way forward, and of potentially implementable and utilizable policies/practices. Communications in Transportation Research is a fully open access journal. It is co-published by Tsinghua University Press and Elsevier, and co-sponsored by the State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy (Tsinghua University) and China Intelligent Transportation Systems Association (ITS China). At its discretion, Tsinghua University Press will pay the open access fee for all published papers from 2021 to 2025.

 

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