ANALYSIS of climate misinformation during the COP28 climate summit has revealed that the number of people reached by misleading tweets could have increased by a startling 2401% – a rise of 41 million people.
When looking specifically at the hashtags #ClimateMyth, #ClimateScam and #ClimateHoax on Twitter, there was a 707% increase – 7500 – in total mentions over the two-week COP28 period, compared with the previous fortnight.
The top keywords associated with climate disinformation posts were hoax, scam, conspiracy, lies, idiocy and cult.
The countries with the most misleading tweets included the USA with more than 54,000, the UK with more than 13,500 and Canada with more than 10,300.
The analysis was made by electric vehicle manufacturer Polestar who said the figures showed that more action needs to be taken to tackle the issue. It created a Truth Bot to help debunk some of the most common climate myths back in November.
Over the course of the Polestar Truth Bot being operational in the run-up to and during COP28 (November 20-December 11) there were 398,000 climate-denying tweets using the above terms, averaging around 16,000 per day.
That was a 36% increase on the previous 16-day period (November 4-19) when there were 188,000 tweets, totalling 12,000 a day.
“The misuse of climate information can be incredibly damaging, particularly surrounding occasions such as COP28, as reflected in the volume of posts shared around the event,” said Fredrika Klarén, head of sustainability at Polestar.
“As one of Polestar’s core values, transparency is a powerful tool in improving sustainable practice and enabling more informed customer decisions. As a business, we will continue to call for the entire industry to become more transparent about sustainability.”
A recent report by Angela McLean, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, said media discussion of issues such as low-traffic neighbourhoods in the UK has featured misinformation and contributed to a discourse favouring delays to climate action.
It added: “The UK media has moved past attempting to present a balanced argument regarding climate change which gave voice to climate deniers but some outlets continue to give voice to unscientific views on second-order issues such as heat pumps."
The report went on to note that climate disinformation narratives are “increasingly connected” to other narratives or protests, for example, claims that 15-minute cities aim to increase control of individuals by governments.
