Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Social Computing, 2022
In the face of the growing global influence and prevalence of Chinese technology companies, governments worldwide have expressed concern and mistrust toward these companies. There have been few studies that focus on large-scale public reaction to this phenomenon. This study aims to fill in the gap of understanding the public opinion toward Chinese technology companies using Reddit data, a popular news-oriented social media platform. We employ the state-of-the-art transformer model to build a reliable sentiment classifier. We then use LDA to extract the topics associated with positive and negative comments. We also conduct content analysis by studying the changes in the semantic meaning of the companies' names over time. Our main findings include the following: 1) Notable difference exists in the proportions of positive comments (8.42%) and negative comments (14.12%); 2) Positive comments are mostly associated with the companies' consumer products, such as smartphones, laptops, and wearable electronics. Negative comments have a more diverse topic distribution (notable topics include criticism toward the platform, dissatisfaction with the companies' smartphone products, companies' ties to the Chinese government, data security concerns, 5G construction, and general politics discussions); and 3) Characterization of each technology company is usually centered around a particular predominant theme related to the company, while real-world political events may trigger drastic changes in users' characterization.