Climate ‘hoaxes’ on the rise
Social media trends push disinformation on global warming to new heights, writes
False information about climate change flourished online over the past year, researchers say, with denialist social media posts and conspiracy theories surging after US environmental reforms and Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.
“What really surprised us this year was to see a resurgence in language that is reminiscent of the 1980s: phrases like ‘climate hoax’ and ‘climate scam’ that deny the phenomenon of climate change,” said Jennie King, head of civic action at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based digital research group.
Popular topics included the false claims that CO² does not cause climate change or that global warming is not caused by human activity, said Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a coalition of campaigners, in a report.
“Let me expose what the climate scam is actually all about,” read one of the most-shared tweets, cited in another survey by US non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc (ADI).
“It is a wealth transfer from you — to the global elite.”
DISINFORMATION SURGE
An analysis of Twitter messages — carried out for AFP by two computational social scientists at City, University of London — counted 1.1 million tweets or retweets using strong climate-sceptic terms in 2022.
That was nearly twice the figure for 2021, said researchers Max Falkenberg and Andrea Baronchelli. They found climate denial posts peaked in December, the month after Tesla billionaire Musk took over the platform.
Use of the denialist hashtag #ClimateScam surged on Twitter from July, according to analyses by CAAD and the US-based campaign group Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
For weeks it was the top suggested search term on the site for users typing “climate”.
CAAD said the reason for that was “unclear”, though one major user of the term appeared to be an automated account, possibly indicating that a malignant bot was churning it out.
ADI noted that July saw US President Joe Biden secure support for a major climate spending bill — subject of numerous “climate scam” tweets — plus a heatwave in the United States and Europe. Climate denial posts also peaked during the COP27 climate summit in November.
A quarter of all the strongly climate-sceptic tweets came from just 10 accounts, including Canadian right-wing populist party leader Maxime Bernier and Paul Joseph Watson, editor of conspiracy-theory website InfoWars, the City research showed.
CCDH pointed the finger at Mr Musk, who reinstated numerous banned Twitter accounts and allowed users to pay for a blue tick — a mark previously reserved for accredited “verified” users in the public eye.
“Elon Musk’s decision to open up his platform for hate and disinformation has led to an explosion in climate disinformation on the platform,” said Callum Hood, CCDH’s head of research.
Mr Musk himself tweeted in August 2022: “I do think global warming is a major risk.”
But prolific climate change contrarians — such as blogger Tony Heller and former coal executive Steve Milloy — have hailed him in their tweets.
CULTURE WARS
The CAAD report said climate content regularly features alongside other misleading claims on “electoral fraud, vaccinations, the Covid-19 pandemic, migration, and child trafficking rings run by so-called ‘elites.’”
Jennie King of ISD said: “We are definitely seeing a rise of out-and-out ‘conspiracism.’ Climate is the latest vector in the culture wars.”
CCDH’s Hood emphasised the urgency of restricting the reach of misinformation.
“We would encourage platforms to think about the real harm that is caused by climate change,” he said, “so people who repeatedly spread demonstrably false information about climate are not granted the sort of reach that we see them getting.”
‘‘ Climate is the latest vector in the culture wars. JENNIE KING INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC DIALOGUE