Shocked, Shocked!! Another Thing Social Media Are Really Good For - Spreading Climate Lies And Anti-Science Bullshit

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A new report, published on Friday by international nonprofit Global Witness, found that climate misinformation and disinformation spread unchecked on TikTok during COP29, mostly in user comments on videos. The users they identified denied man-made global warming and rebuked efforts to combat it, claiming that climate change is a “lie” or “hoax.” In recent years, social media platforms like X, Facebook and even LinkedIn have emerged as efficient vehicles to spread this type of inaccurate rhetoric as quickly as climate-fueled wildfires. Online influencers and prominent political figures, particularly President-elect Donald Trump, have fanned these flames on social media, a worrisome trend as trust in science and journalists continues in some communities to plummet, experts say.

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And there’s a reason social media celebrities are known as “influencers.” A study published in February found that just a few individuals play an outsize role on what is now X in shaping belief or denial of climate change in the U.S. Using artificial intelligence to analyze social media data from 2017 to 2019, the researchers found that Trump had the biggest influence on climate denialism on that platform, as well as three groups that frequently retweeted him, including The Daily Wire, Breitbart and Climate Depot.

“During the 2017-2019 study period, the most heavily retweeted post includes one by Trump that questions climate change due to unusually cold weather in the U.S.,” co-author Joshua Newell, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, said in a press release. He added that climate skeptics and believers often form separate “echo chambers” that do not interact with each other.

An Online Storm: After Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in September and October, a torrent of conspiracy theories over the cause of the storms swirled on social media. Some people posting claimed that the government created the hurricanes using weather machines, which do not exist, or that solar geoengineering worsened the weather, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration clarified that this practice is not taking place at scale anywhere in the world. As this disinformation deluge hit, meteorologists were accused of pushing a “climate change agenda” and received frequent backlash or threats from viewers, James Marshall Shepherd, a former NASA weather scientist who is currently director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric sciences program, told Yale Environment 360.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10122024/todays-climate-climate-misinformation-social-media/