Perception of United Nations Climate Change Conference in Social Networks

Expanding influence of social media platforms on the internet has led to an increase in online public discourse and perception regarding varied crucial subject matters. Climate change and climate-related news are some of the most significant discourses online and we have established our work on the conversations in online forums. In this paper, we have analysed the online interaction among groups having differing perceptions and opinions regarding the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference(COP26). We have considered both sentiment analysis and stance detection of the posts for our perception analysis using homophily and polarisation. We have proposed a novel metric for determination of homophily score in the different interaction networks extracted from the social media platform Twitter. We observed that interaction in retweet network exhibits higher homophily and polarisation. The quote tweet network and reply-to networks shows less homophily with relatively higher interaction with users having alternate views.