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COP, LOOK, LISTEN ISSUE 01 | 10 NOV 25

Climate Disinfo Digest Issue 10 November 2025

Hello and welcome to CAAD’s first COP, LOOK, LISTEN of COP30, thanks for joining us!

If this is your first time being blessed with CAAD’s content during a COP, be sure to subscribe, and then we’d like to invite you to catch up on our reports from the past four years before checking out our newest this year, Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified. We started in 2021, and laid the groundwork for how disinformation is spread on digital media in the original Deny, Deceive, Delay report written in the months after COP26, covering the narratives and networks of climate disinformation, and explaining how CAAD’s policy solutions would address that harmful false content.

Those patterns held true for DDD Vol 2, where CAAD quantified the fossil fuel industry’s millions spent on Meta ads, Twitter’s #ClimateScam issue, and the recurrence of actors and narratives around COP27. The next year, ahead of COP28, the information integrity framework had emerged in DDD Vol 3, but the problems remained the same, so by COP29, in 2024, we focused specifically on the rising tide of extreme weather-based disinformation with case studies that remain painfully relevant as Big Tech refuses to address the information integrity crisis they’re causing.

That’s why we’re doing things a little different this year, with Deny, Deceive, Delay: Demystified, CAAD’s pre-COP30 report, and our Disinfo Intelligence Unit set up to bring you cool findings (just about) every day of COP, usually with the help of our friends. Case in point: check out InfluenceMap’s great new Brazil Platform showing how companies are living up to their promises- or not, as is much, much more common.

We’re happy to have so many friends these days, because we’re not going to stop those stopping climate action with words alone, we need to build power by building community, and thankfully, we’re not alone. Finally, information integrity is on the COP agenda, and with the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, world leaders from Brazil to France and around the world are finally taking climate disinformation seriously.

Meanwhile, CAAD doesn’t need to focus on social media quite so much, because now  mainstream media is reporting on how Xitter pushes rightwing hate, for example. And Reuters revealed last week how Meta projected it would make $16 billion off of straight up scams, some 10% of its annual revenue last year. Internal documents claimed Meta was involved in a third of all successful scams in the US, but efforts to fix that would only be allowed if they didn’t impact more than 0.15% of the company’s revenue, meaning major spenders could get caught scamming an incredible 500 times before they would get shut down. Even then, Reuters caught Meta failing to enforce its policies to protect users from such profitable scams.

What’s new this year is the COP30 host, Brazil, so the first of our friends we want to highlight is FALA, our Brazilian partners who have been rocking the info integrity world this year, and are releasing a bunch of great stuff during COP30- sign up here!  To pique your curiosity, here’s an excerpt of DDD:Demystified, which opens with a section on FALA’s excellent coverage of the Brazilian disinformation environment.

FINDING OF THE DAY

(The First of) Four Brazilian Examples of Disinformation

As the world’s attention turned to Brazil as the host of COP30, CAAD’s Brazilian colleagues at FALA, fresh from documenting the global $78 billion “supply chain of lies” in Brazil since 2020, launched the Observatory for Information Integrity. The project and its accompanying “Oii” newsletter document how disinformation has been used to hurt Brazilians.

The first edition of Oii proved that the situation in Brazil will be both familiar and startling to the traditionally Anglocentric climate disinformation community.

The findings are familiar in that the disinformation is coming from the far right and polluters, as identified by Carlos Milani, a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and co-author of the book “Climate Obstruction,” who has said: “Climate denial in Brazil is pushed most explicitly by far-right figures, a small group of anti-environmentalist activists and ultra-conservative leaders (such as Ricardo Felício, Evaristo Miranda, Bertrand de Orleans e Bragança, Alain Santos, among others)…”

But, unlike in US or UK contexts, in Brazil and other nations of the Global Majority, physical intimidation is much more common. For example, Cristiana Losekann, professor at the Federal University of Espirito Santo, described how machine gun-armed officials intimidated communities on behalf of companies at an event in 2025. The violence against, and murder of, environmental land defenders forms the extreme end of the spectrum of tactics that corporations and states use to secure a profit over the objections of people. As Global Witness has reported, at least 146 land and environmental defenders were killed or disappeared in 2024, and over 2,250 since 2012.

Check out the report for the other two examples, including some fun (terrible) stats and a story about generative AI disinfo that’s already caught the media’s attention, and sign up to Oii for a ton of new content coming out during COP30!

GOOD TO KNOW

89% of the global public wants more climate action from their leaders, and 69% would give 1% of their monthly income to fight climate change- but think only 43% of others would do the same. That’s the impact of disinfo!

82% of Canadians want the country to join global initiatives to strengthen information integrity on social media.

Over 70% of people in Spain and the UK think fighting climate disinformation is essential to protect free speech and informed public debate.

LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS

 

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, or want to find out more about our research and intel during the summit, please email [email protected]. We also have members on the ground in Belém who are available for interviews and side-events.