Climate disinfo surges in denial, conspiracy comeback

Climate disinfo surges in denial, conspiracy
comeback

January 31 2023, by Roland LLOYD PARRY

Watchdogs are urging social media platforms to tackle climate disinformation.

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.

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"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, 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."

Twitter disinfo 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

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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.

Monthly number of tweets containing terms associated with strong forms of
climate scepticism, according to a study from City, University of London.

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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.

Blue-tick deniers

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 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.

Musk himself tweeted in August 2022: "I do think global warming is a
major risk."

Musk has also created a $100 million dollar prize for technology
innovations shown to be effective in removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere.

But prolific climate change contrarians -– such as blogger Tony Heller
and former coal executive Steve Milloy—have hailed him in their

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tweets.

Conspiracy theories

An analysis by Advance Democracy seen by AFP found the number of
Twitter posts "using climate change denialism terms" more than tripled
from 2021 to 2022, reaching over 900,000.

Climate sceptics say Twitter boss Elon Musk has helped make their voices heard
on the platform.

On TikTok, views of videos using hashtags associated with climate
change denialism increased by 4.9 million, it said.

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On YouTube, climate change denial videos got hundreds of thousands of
views, with searches for them bringing up adverts for climate-denial
products.

YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez told AFP that in response to
the claim, certain climate-denial ads had been taken down.

TikTok and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

On Facebook, meanwhile, ADI found the number of such posts
decreased compared to 2021, in line with overall climate change claims.

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."

Given the reports by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change showing that human carbon emissions are heating the planet,
raising the risk of floods, droughts and heatwaves, 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," Hood said, "so people who repeatedly spread
demonstrably false information about climate are not granted the sort of
reach that we see them getting."

© 2023 AFP

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