Public perceptions of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) based on social media data: Evidence from China

Environmental and social challenges are intensifying globally. Then along comes more demands to deliver successful environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes. Understanding public perceptions of ESG is paramount to gaining public support, advancing ESG actions, and creating a sustainable ESG policy system. This study aims to explore the general public's perceptions of ESG. The setting is China, where ESG is in its infancy and ESG policies are incomplete. Given the richness of social media data, a social media analytics (SMA) framework is applied to obtain public perceptions from Sina Weibo, the largest Chinese social media platform. The SMA framework integrates descriptive analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis to investigate the characteristics of users concerned about ESG, discover latent ESG-based topics from posts and examine corresponding attention, as well as identify public sentiment orientation and opinions on ESG from their comments. The results indicate that there are regional and industry-specific disparities in ESG-conscious users. The latent topics often discussed in posts include ESG investment, ESG disclosure, ESG rating, and ESG notion and practice. It is observed that the increasing number of Weibo posts has not received the corresponding growing attention. The comments containing positive, neutral, and negative sentiments account for 66.03%, 17.37%, and 16.60%, respectively. The negative sentiments might result from the greenwashing effect, inadequate knowledge of ESG, inconsistency among ESG ratings, and lack of transparency in rating methods. The findings can aid policymakers and corporations in proactively comprehending public needs and providing guidance for effective ESG communication on social media and policy improvement.