Voices of transitions: Korea’s online news media and user comments on the energy transition

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Abstract

It is important to understand stakeholders’ attitudes toward energy transition policies, or indeed toward any government proposal. Online news platforms are agoras where media and people interact, so they appear to be a rich vein for mining media and public attitudes toward energy transition. We collected online news articles and comments with the keyword “energy transition,” along with such commenters’ activity histories, from the largest Korean online news aggregator during the July 2021 to July 2022 shift in the government. Utilizing advanced machine learning approaches, we examined the media’s evaluation of energy transition, users’ emotions regarding it, and the influence of various features on commenters’ emotions and elaborations in comments. We found that intense negative emotions dominated news comments about the energy transition. However, our analysis of users’ historical activities found that the commenters were a raging political crowd who expressed intense negative emotions about many social and political issues. Furthermore, our application of Catboost regression analysis demonstrates how news framing can facilitate deliberation by relieving the intensity of emotions and enhancing users’ deliberation. Our findings suggest being cautious about using online news platform data to gauge media and public attitudes toward energy transition. The findings also highlight the need to use comprehensive datasets and approaches to avoid misunderstanding stakeholders’ attitudes toward energy policy, as expressed in online spaces. These findings can guide future studies that use news comments to understand public attitudes toward energy transition policies or other contentious proposals.