Sustainable Development Discourse in Social Media: Identifying and Segmenting

In recent years, the concept of sustainable development has become increasingly relevant. Market representatives are reconsidering their strategies, and people are becoming more involved in eco-practices and interested in consuming sustainable products and services. However, the prevalence of greenwashing among companies and the focus of some only on profiting from sustainability investments rather than protecting the environment raises questions about companies' motives when implementing sustainability strategies. Moreover, there are no unified certification and rating systems to evaluate the activities implemented by companies. In this study, we will analyze the information broadcast on sustainable development in the media in order to determine society’s attitude towards the concept, determine which aspect of ESG initiatives is relevant in the media space and identify the main agents of the agenda. For the study, qualitative (inductive content analysis) and quantitative methods (data mining, machine learning, text mining, topic modeling of latent Dirichlet distribution (LDA), TF-IDF analysis) were used. Data collection was carried out using data parsing via the Youtube API. The data selection criteria were the year (2015-2024) and the topic of the video (search query for the words “sustainable development”, “ESG development”, “ESG transformation”). As a result of the study, it is planned to identify the main agents of the sustainable development agenda, thematic blocks for comments by users of the Yotube video platform, frequently mentioned aspects of the concept of sustainable development and attitudes towards it. First of all, this work will consider the information field, main trends and agents of sustainable development. Next, various theoretical approaches will be used to analyze aspects of the concept and the factors influencing people's attitudes towards it. Following the literature review, we describe the research methodology in detail, including problem statement, theoretical assumptions, and limitations. In conclusion, we will present the data analysis and conclusions drawn on the basis of the scientific work carried out.