Modeling the Social Acceptability of Technologies Using Twitter Data
Hidetsugu Nanba, Katsuya Yamamoto, Satoshi Fukuda, Hiroko Shoji, Masayoshi Tanishita, Yasushi Kyutoku, Mitsuru Yamashina · 2023
Our society is built on the benefits of technological development, but this development also entails risks. When the convenience of a new technology outweighs the sense of anxiety about its risks, we can consider that this technology is socially accepted. In this study, we use the social media to analyze the general public's anxiety feelings toward various technologies and model the social acceptability of the new technologies based on this analysis. In this study, 6,452,730 tweets about three technologies: “automated driving,” “electronic currency,” and “drones” were collected, and the social acceptability of the technologies was examined using emotion classification, text categorization, and topic analysis techniques. As a result, we concluded that the anxiety about unemployment can be one perspective for analyzing the social acceptability of a technology.