  In this paper we explore the challenges of measuring sentiment in relation to
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) social media. ESG has grown in
importance in recent years with a surge in interest from the financial sector
and the performance of many businesses has become based in part on their ESG
related reputations. The use of sentiment analysis to measure ESG related
reputation has developed and with it interest in the use of machines to do so.
The era of digital media has created an explosion of new media sources, driven
by the growth of social media platforms. This growing data environment has
become an excellent source for behavioural insight studies across many
disciplines that includes politics, healthcare and market research. Our study
seeks to compare human performance with the cutting edge in machine performance
in the measurement of ESG related sentiment. To this end researchers classify
the sentiment of 150 tweets and a reliability measure is made. A gold standard
data set is then established based on the consensus of 3 researchers and this
data set is then used to measure the performance of different machine
approaches: one based on the VADER dictionary approach to sentiment
classification and then multiple language model approaches, including Llama2,
T5, Mistral, Mixtral, FINBERT, GPT3.5 and GPT4.
