Extreme Weather, Extreme Content: How Big Tech Enables Climate Disinformation in a World on the Brink

As COP29 gets underway, the consequences of climate change are ever more extreme. So too with climate mis- and disinformation, now ubiquitous online. CAAD’s latest report uncovers the prevalence and nature of online climate dis- and misinformation, which rages on for another year.

As extreme weather events due to climate change become more commonplace, the world needs more than ever to take effective, multi-lateral action. But the digital information landscape is dangerously polluted, obscuring the truth and delaying the urgent action we need to protect our future. Big Oil and Big Tech are facilitating an ongoing reframing of extreme weather events, as well as ready solutions to the crisis, turning them into fodder for opposition to climate action.

This report presents three new case studies that provide a snapshot into the online world of English-language climate disinformation.

Key findings from the report include:

• Opposition to renewables: Despite having years to clean up their platforms, Big Tech continues to allow a small number of “super-spreaders” to pollute their platforms with debunked claims attacking renewable energy and electric vehicles. Many claims are uncannily similar to ones seen during COP26, three years ago. Increasingly, renewable energies are also framed as a tool for social control.

• Weaponising wildfires: Disinformation operations are exploiting extreme weather events to fuel opposition to climate policies, and recently, have led to threats of violence against emergency response personnel. Content actively seeks to decouple extreme weather from its environmental drivers.

• Fossil fuel advertising on Meta: Fossil fuel companies continue to use digital advertising to launder their image.. Eight fossil fuel advertisers paid just one platform, Meta, at least $17.6 million for over 700 million impressions over the past year. The adverts we analysed greenwash by pushing fossil-fuel oriented approaches; presenting fossil fuels as essential components of the needed energy transition; and lobbying for changes in policy at the federal or state level in the US. 

Data Access in Dire Straits

Without the ability to diagnose a problem, you cannot hope to fix it. At a time where tracking and dissecting trends at scale and in real time is more important than ever, researcher access is degrading. Much of our previous analyses that have mobilised the climate sector and policymakers in previous CAAD research could no longer be produced in the current landscape. This unfortunate trend is making effective study of climate change dis- and misinformation – especially during times of crisis like extreme weather events – harder than ever. 

What can we do?

This is not an unsolvable problem. A host of initiatives and legislations like the UN Global Principles, the Global Digital Compact and the EU Digital Services Act demonstrate that we know which levers exist and how they can improve our information ecosystems. 

However, such levers must focus on the profit motives for content creators that disinform, the tech platforms who take a cut, and, crucially, the polluters who rake in revenue year-on-year exploiting this system. We cannot fixate on litigating post-by-post, but must address the systems behind them and the actors they reward, whether corporate, state-sponsored, political or individual. Better information alone – through more scientific data, fact-checks or storytelling alone – will not achieve the change we need if we do not also address the core, architectural problems at play.