Voices of Transitions: Korea’s Online News Media and User Comments on the Energy Transition
Date:
This study collected online news and relevant comments with keywords “energy transition” and the history of the commenters’ activities from the largest online news aggregator, Naver during the regime shift period in Korea from July 2021 to July 2022.
Author
Byungjun Kim, Soeun Yang, and Hana Kim
Abstract
Understanding the attitudes of important stakeholders towards energy transition is crucial. Online news platforms can be served as a rich source to mine both media and public attitudes towards energy transition functioning as agoras where the media and people interact. This study collected online news and relevant comments with keywords “energy transition” and the history of the commenters’ activities from the largest online news aggregator, Naver during the regime shift period in Korea from July 2021 to July 2022. Utilizing advanced machine learning approaches, this study examined the media’s evaluation and the users’ emotions regarding energy transition and the influences of various features on commenters’ emotions and elaborations in comments. We found that intense negative emotion was dominant in news comments; however, commenters also expressed mostly this strong negative emotion towards various other topics in the past. The intensity of this emotion against energy transition can be mitigated by more positive or neutral framing in news headlines. Furthermore, the commenter elaboration could be promoted by the framing. This study shed light on the potential and limitations of using online news platform data to gauge media and public attitudes towards energy transition.