Fridays for Future Wants to Save the World : But What Do People Think about the Movement?

Abstract

Fridays for Future is a movement initiated by Greta Thunberg designed to alert millions around the globe that we are amid a climate crisis by organising Friday protests. Led by Greta Thunberg, Fridays for Future has generated a lot of press in recent years: Greta has been listed among the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women as well as being twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Greta was also named Time Magazine Person of the Year 2019. While her cause may be noble, many criticise the Fridays for Future movement—others simply do not believe in its global warming message.

Twitter is a powerful electronic word of mouth (eWOM) platform, which, as a form of peer-to-peer communication, has the power to influence human behaviour from product adoption to voting behaviours. Twitter offers a convenient and efficient global platform for sharing opinions or referring to news items. Using hashtags, users can reach vast audiences who are already interested in specific topics regardless of spatial and temporal considerations. Twitter also provides a historical record of eWOM communication where the popularity of any topic can be gauged from the numbers of likes and retweets.

Greta is an avid Twitter user who uses the platform to promote the Fridays for Future protests for climate change. Therefore, to investigate the global attitudes towards Greta’s cause, we utilised sentiment analysis of Twitter content to gauge how users worldwide feel about Greta and her movement. Sentiment analysis (also called opinion mining) simply involves analysing data contained in natural language such as those featuring in Tweets. Sentiment analysis refers to performing natural language processing (NLP) via the use of computational linguistics software to extract and identify quantitative data about positive and negative sentiments towards a particular issue.