Public perception of electric vehicles on Reddit and Twitter: A cross-platform analysis

Electrified mobility such as electric vehicles (EVs) is a promising solution to reduce carbon emissions in transportation and mitigate global warming. Understanding public perception of EVs can help better support their adoption. A previous study shows that online social networks (OSNs) such as Reddit can be a valuable source for studying public perceptions of EVs and provide different perspectives from traditional methods that leverage surveys, questionnaires, or interviews (Ruan and Lv, 2022). The work aims to investigate this direction further through the following research question: Given the distinct mechanisms of various OSNs, can one obtain a more comprehensive picture of public perception of EVs by integrating the analysis from different platforms? Specifically, the study is based on EV-related discussions on two popular OSN platforms: Twitter and Reddit. The authors have collected 3,437,917 Reddit posts (including 274,979 submissions and 3,162,938 comments) and 7,383,327 Tweets between January 2011 and December 2020 and analyzed them from several perspectives. The analysis shows that users have had different topic and sentiment patterns in EV-related discussions on the two platforms over the past decade. The authors also leverage the verified account information on Twitter to reveal that the most influential users are politicians and news media; however, the general public has very different conversation patterns with the two types of accounts — politicians seem to be increasingly (over) optimistic about EVs while the public may think differently.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2023.100872
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198223001197
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/25901982
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Ruan, Tao
  • 0000-0002-3889-974X
  • Lv, Qin
• Publication Date: 2023-9

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 100872
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives
  • Volume: 21
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 2590-1982
  • Serial URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/transportation-research-interdisciplinary-perspectives
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Attitudes; Data analysis; Electric vehicles; Public opinion; Social media
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01889149
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 27 2023 4:55PM