With COP29 underway, new report reveals how Big tech fuels false climate information

Big Tech is actively fueling the climate crisis by allowing Big Oil and disinformation actors to spread lies about renewables, wildfires, and hurricanes to undermine climate action, says a new report

As the annual UN climate negotiations are underway, a new report has found that social media companies have failed to protect the public from “super-spreaders” of false narratives, while also taking millions from Big Oil to run fossil fuel propaganda advertisements reinforcing demand for climate-changing activities. 

The report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD) found that Big Tech continues to allow a small number of “super-spreaders” to pollute their platforms with debunked claims attacking renewable energy and electric vehicles. One such X/Twitter user has seen a 1750x increase in followers since March 2023, the report said. 

According to the report, eight fossil fuel advertisers paid Meta at least $17.6 million for over 700 million impressions over the past year. 

“For the third year running, CAAD has documented millions of dollars of fossil fuel advertising around COP,” said CAAD Intelligence unit coordinator Sean Buchan. “While the world meets to try to keep the Paris Agreement promise, the fossil fuel industry pollutes the information ecosystem to cloud our minds. A fossil fuel ad ban is imperative to protect public health and accelerate climate action.”

False content on spread

So far, 2024 has seen multiple extreme weather events. The report found that the public response to these events was hampered by the spread of false content online. From conspiracy theories about wildfires being used to clear land for renewables to viral claims that resulted in US Federal Emergency Management Agency workers being hunted by those they’re saving, the threat of letting disinformation spread unchecked is undeniable.  

The report said that internet discussions about wildfires are becoming more and more connected to conspiracy theories about geoengineering and schemes carried out by governments or “elites.” Over time, misinformation targeting renewable energy sources, specifically wind, solar, and electric vehicles (EVs), has shown remarkable consistency, the report said. Debunked talking points, which include misleading claims that such technologies are ineffective, unreliable, harmful, excessively expensive, or negatively impact animals and natural ecosystems, continue to elicit significant levels of participation.

Other high-traction posts falsely claimed the hurricanes were not a natural occurrence, but rather engineered with the goal of devastating North Carolina and clearing land for a lithium mining operation, found the report. 

Big Tech needs to step up

Big Oil and Big Tech are enabling a continuous reinterpretation of extreme weather events, transforming them into arguments against climate action. This is in contrast to previous climate communications efforts, which assumed that heightened awareness of extreme weather events and climate change would inevitably result in heightened concern about climate change.

At the same time, the report added, social media companies are also reducing transparency by shutting down access to data and making it more difficult for research efforts to even quantify the size and scale of the disinformation problem on their platforms, leaving policy makers increasingly in the dark on the problem. 

The report said that information integrity can be improved by efforts like the UN Global Principles and the Global Digital Compact, and legislation like the EU’s Digital Services Act that help address climate disinformation in a holistic and meaningful manner, while also pursuing important efforts to remove the economic incentive to spread disinformation. 

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