Perspectives on Forests and Forestry in Finnish Online Discussions - A Topic Modeling Approach to Suomi24

Abstract

This paper explores how forests and forest industry are perceived on the largest online discussion forum in Finland, Suomi24 ('Finland24'). Using 30,636 posts published in 2014–2020, we investigate what kind of topics and perspectives towards forest management can be found. We use BERTopic as our topic modeling approach and evaluate the results of its different modular combinations. As the dataset is not labeled, we demonstrate the validity of our best model through illustrating some of the topics about forest use. The results show that a combination of UMAP and K-means leads to the best topic quality. Our exploratory qualitative analysis indicates that the posts reflect polarized discourses between the forest industry and forest conservation adherents.