From Sustainable Development Goals to sustainable industry, innovation and infrastructure: insights from the digital sphere

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze and understand the digital discussion on Twitter (from 2016 to 2022) of the SDGs in general and SDG 9 in particular, based on a comparative approach and with a methodology using Python libraries for advanced data analysis, social network analysis (SNA) methods and artificial neural networks (ANN) models. To this end, 6,323,139 tweets about SDGs in general and 2,892,922 about specific SDGs were retrieved for further analysis. The results obtained show that SDG 9 generated less interest and a lower presence of women in the social discussion than other SDGs over the seven years studied; furthermore, the number of tweets about SDG 9 has decreased. However, the digital conversation among different actors does develop in a cohesive manner, sharing leadership and space. This study shows that there are exceptional peaks in the digital activity and the SDG topic goes from “sidestream” to “mainstream” in terms of the digital public debate when certain celebrities (specifically, the Korean music group BTS) interact with the initiative. Finally, SDGs do not generate controversy and there is no substantial difference in the distribution of sentiment and emotions between different periods and different SDGs.