A comparative study on LinkedIn and Sina Weibo users’ perceptions of the carbon-neutral city

Abstract

A carbon-neutral city is one of the most critical topics in carbon neutrality. To study the general public and professionals’ focus, we analysed the posts on Weibo and LinkedIn through Pycharm, Navicat Premium, KHCoder, and Tableau. This study included 1908 microposts (14,668 sentences) on Weibo and 533 posts (3733 sentences) on LinkedIn. On Weibo, the most influential users were governments and organisations; for example, Baotou Daily, Beijing Ecological Environment, 922 Green Travel, Baotou Evening News, and Baoding Evening News. On LinkedIn, the most influential person was the co-director of Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. The most popular topics on LinkedIn included “city,” “carbon,” “climate,” “neutral,” “energy,” “emission,” “sustainability,” “sustainable,” “neutrality” and the keywords of “world”; while “carbon,” “city,” “energy,” “development,” “new,” “green,” “promote,” “neutrality,” “construction” and “industry” are more prevalent in Weibo. Both LinkedIn and Weibo users focus on “energy” and related issues. LinkedIn users mentioned “climate” and “sustainability” most in their posts, but Weibo users concerned about green development in the construction industry. Copyright © 2022 Zeng, Li, Mao, Chen and Zeng.