Enara Zarrabeitia-Bilbao1, Jordi Morales-i-Gras2, Rosa M. Rio-Belver3y Gaizka Garechana-Anacabe4
1 University of the Basque Country, Plaza Ingeniero Torres Quevedo, 1. 48013 Bilbao, Spain
2 University of the Basque Country, Barrio Sarriena, s/n. 48940 Leioa, Spain
3 University of the Basque Country, C/ Nieves Cano 12, 01007 Vitoria, Spain
4 University of the Basque Country, C/ Elcano 21 48008 Bilbao, Spain
Keywords: Green energy, Twitter, Social Network Analysis, big data.
Research carried out
This research work focuses on the globally known microblogging platform, Twitter, among other issues, because it is a suitable space for social interaction, dialectical exchange and deliberation that has aroused great interest in the academic and scientific community due to the type of conversation that takes in this digital sphere.
Twitter has become an established medium for communicating different issues of real life [1,2]. Hence, it allows discovering how different actors participate in various related debates, among others, such as climate change, global warming or environmental activism [3–5]. Thus, different topics related to the environment and sustainability have been analyzed through Twitter data and Social Network Analysis.
In this way, this study analyzes the green energy trends through Twitter data mining. For this objective, on the one hand, it is analyzed the relationships established between the digital users through Twitter mentions and it is studied the different main communities established; and on the other hand, it is analyzed the discussions generated through the co-occurrence of the most significant words of different tweets.
For all that, this study employs techniques of massive data analysis in social networks for data captured from Twitter during 2020 (from 01-01-2020 to 31-12-2020) through web scraping. In total, 236,233 tweets have been processed using big data techniques with different software (Pajek, Gephi and Orange Data Mining).
The results show which are the nine main communities related to green energy, as well as who are their respective leaders. Moreover, the main topics of discussion are also inferred.
The main communities are generated around politics, socio-economic issues and environmental activism and the different discussion topics are about green energy sources and storage, and in consonance with the communities detected, about political, socio-economic and climate change themes. However, although many of the conversations have revolved around socio-economic subject, leading company users are minor. Hence, being social networks an important tool for companies, it is worth mentioning the low presence of companies as leaders of the digital conversation.
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