Twitter’s Fake News Discourses Around Climate Change and Global Warming

Abstract

In this empirical study, we collected about 6.8 million tweets that mentioned “fake news”, and we extracted references to climate change and/or global warming to understand the public discourses around these two issues. Using a mixed method, the study’s findings show that there is a clear politically polarized discussion on climate change. We found that the majority of tweets focus on the United States context though references to other Western coutnries are often made. The anti-Liberal or anti-Democratic online community was more active on Twitter than the anti-conservative or anti-Republican community. Also, more than half the examined most retweeted posts contained claims about climate change being a natural cycle or even denying it exists, while about a third of these tweets stated that climate change was anthropogenic. The implications of the study are discussed, we argue that fake news as a term has a hollow meaning as it is used as a buzzword to discredit opponents and further the political agenda of different parties not only in the United States but also in other Western countries like Australia.

Do Greek University Students Trust Social Media Regarding Science Related Issues? The Covid-19 Case

“…At the same time, the phenomenon of the widespread dissemination of false and misleading information is being observed, with social media being the most appropriate channel for its production and its rapid and widespread dissemination (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017;Zimmer, et al, 2019;Avram, et al, 2020;Kouzy, et al, 2020;Li, et al, 2020;Ofcom, 2020;Pennycook, et al, 2020). Among the issues that vary in terms of their subject matter, the presence of misinformation is also found in general science-related issues (Allgaier, 2019;Landrum, et al, 2019;Cox, 2019;Al-Rawi, et al, 2021), as well as, in particular, the science of medicine (Kata, 2010;Buchanan & Beckett, 2014;Tonsaker, et al, 2014;Arseniev-Kohler, et al, 2016;Biggs, et al, 2013;Gage-Bouchard, et al, 2017;Blankenship, et al, 2018;Bora, et al, 2018;Cavazos-Rehg, et al, 2018;Gu & Hong, 2019;Brennen, et al, 2020;Gao, et al, 2020;Kouzy, et al, 2020;Li, et al, 2020;Pennycook, et al, 2020;WHO, 2020a).…”

Perspective and review: how to develop our understanding of temporal changes in the relationship between people and the landscape under societal and climate change in Northeast Asia?

“…Moreover, there is potential bias with social media users because of the characteristics of country, region, age, and so on. In addition, the contents of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube often include falsehoods and ethical issues (i.e., hate claims, and slander and libel against specific individuals or groups) (Al-Rawi et al, 2021;Albahli, 2022;Leahy et al, 2022;Toliyat et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022). They also are limited and contain uncertainty caused by a lack of clarity in the terms of use for data and copyright, and Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube lack exact geolocation information unlike Instagram and Flickr (Shin et al, 2021;2024a).…”

role of social bots in the Brazilian environmental debate:

“…A study that examined the period around the time of former USA President Donald Trump's announcement of the country's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, in 2017, found that suspected bots in Twitter conversations were more frequent in some topic areas than others, including denialist discourse (Marlow et al 2021). Another work found that, on Twitter, discussions on 'global warming' (preferred expression between conservatives) are heavily influenced by automated accounts, unlike 'climate change' (preferred expression between liberals), in which the majority of the top users appear to actually be humans (Al-Rawi et al 2021). With a dataset queried in English at the time of United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2018 (COP24), another study found that, in Twitter networks of both climate contrarians and climate accepters, botlike accounts were equally active (Tyagi et al 2020).…”