The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit

Well-informed collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public’s understanding of the relevant scientific findings. Social media has been a popular platform for the deliberation around climate change and the policies aimed at addressing it. Whether such deliberation is informed by scientific findings is an important step in gauging the public’s awareness of scientific resources and their latest findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. These links are dwarfed, however, by the citations of mass media, newspapers, and social media, the latter of which peaked especially during 2019–2020. Further, scientific sources are more likely to be posted by users who also post links to sources having central-left political leaning, and less so by those posting more polarized sources. Scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources, instead, other such sources are likely to appear in their comments. This study provides the quantitative evidence of the dearth of scientific basis of the online public debate and puts it in the context of other, potentially unreliable, sources of information.