Motivated Reasoning Leads Climate Change Deniers to Access Unreliable Online Sources of Information: Automated Text Analyses of Multiple Reddit Communities

Motivated reasoning suggests that climate change deniers are more likely to access and comment on unreliable online sources of information that support their existing views and political ideologies, whereas climate change believers are more likely to access more objective sources of information not necessarily related to their political viewpoints. To test this hypothesis, an R program in RStudio scraped over 68,000 user-generated comments from multiple Reddit communities (i.e., subreddits) with opposing perspectives on climate change. Leximancer identified the internet domains associated with the URL links in user comments. Consistent with a motivated reasoning explanation, comments from climate change denial subreddits tended to include URL links to content from blogs and social media pages advocating similar ideological positions, whereas comments associated with subreddits based on belief in climate change tended to include URL links to content from news media and academic journals.