Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. A new report was released recently from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the twenty plus member Coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation. It's called Deny, Deceive and Delay, and it documents and responds to climate disinformation from the COP twenty sixth summit to today. It also offers some suggestions for countering disinformation policies that
could help and messaging frameworks that might be helpful. Today, I'm joined by Jenny King, who was the lead author on the report, to walk us through some of the findings and what to make of them.
That conversation's coming up right after this quick break.
So I'm curious to hear maybe a little bit about the process first, how you started looking at this issue and how you kind of honed in on these super spreader accounts in the first place.
Sure, my organization ISD has traditionally looked at the evolution of extremist and conspiracist ideologies and the roles that they are playing in undermining democratic processes and norms and ultimately
fueling haide speech and violence. And over the years we've developed a very large portfolio in lots of different vectors of disinformation, because obviously, disinformation is a key tool used by both extremist and conspiracist movements and also used in the effort to drive polarization in a number of societies, and so working on climate change might seem like a
slightly left field choice. But the reason why we became so interested and decided to build out an entirely new portfolio of work in this space is because we noticed that a lot of the communities we have been monitoring for a number of years were beginning to espouse anti environmental stances, and that there seemed to be a growing confluence between the kinds of anti government, anti elite, broad culture wars, and identity politics framing that you would find
in other really important issue sets like migration or sectional reproductive health rights or hate speech incitement to violence, and what was happening around climate change, and that to us felt like an extremely concerning shift in the evolution of rhetoric around this particular issue, and so we decided to get into the weeds of why that was happening, who it was being driven by, where it was taking place across both social media and legacy media outlets, and more importantly,
what could be done about it, And over the past eighteen months or so, our efforts have then broadened out into the formalization of this coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation, which involves over twenty organizations globally that work either in the counter disinformation space or in the climate science, climate policy, and climate advocacy spaces, and that the combination of those two sets of expertise has given us a really unique
lens in trying to understand what are the tactics at play, not anymore really to deny that climate change exists, but to make sure that meaningful policy is never implemented, either at the dotstick or the multilateral level.
Do you think that there's any indication that this is part of the sort of pivot to ecofascism.
You are certainly seeing the growth in eco fascist rhetoric, or at least the mainstreaming and the normalization of those kinds of ideologies, and of course that fits with the fact that racist rhetoric and particularly phobic and anti migrant rhetoric has become so mainlined in a lot of political discourse,
particularly across Europe, across North America, across Asia Pacific. And it's really worth noting that both the christ Church shooter in New Zealand who committed mass atrocity against Muslim citizens and the recent mass shooter in Buffalo who murdered a number of African American citizens, that both of them, in their online manifestos explicitly associated their own personal stances with eco fascism and the idea that the only way to
solve environmental issues is by reducing population size, stopping the spread of certain communities around the globe, and also linking that to other extremely dangerous and harmful conspiracies like the Great Replacement, which you claim that there is a white genocide being enacted by some shadowy cabal of elites around
the world. It's certainly a growing body of content. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily the narrative which is driving most of the high traction discussions across social media, but yes, I would say that far right political movements in general are certainly engaging with environmentalism in many cases through the lens of their other ideologies, which are you know, exclusionary, nativist, isolationists, etc.
Right right, Okay, So I'm curious how these sixteen accounts that you highlight in the report what you were looking for. That made it clear that, Okay, these people are really like central hubs of this stuff.
So what became very acute to us as a new trend is the fact that a large amount of online discourse is being driven by actors who we are referring to as non climate influencers. And by that what I mean is that these are accounts or individuals for whom climate has never been a key part of either their brand or their public outputs in the past. So they're not the historic deniers that have been active in this space and determined to maintain the status quo for decades.
These are people for whom environmentalism as part of their public platform is potentially relatively new, and that rather than being a preoccupation in and of itself or them having a particular interest in that as an issue, it has become symbolic or indicative for them of broader societal trends, in particular the woke, agender and identity politics, and therefore it provides a very useful vector for them to get other worldviews, other incendiary and sensationist ideas into the mainstream
and to galvanize an audience against climate action. What we began to see is if you looked at keywords that
very clearly situated climate within that culture wars frame. It was people like Jordan B. Peterson, who boasts a followership of over ten million across his digital footprint if you combine his Facebook into Twitter, spreadit and his TikTok et cetera, or other people that broadly sit in They often refer to themselves as the quote unquote intellectual dark web that suddenly they had moved into the climate space, and that they clearly saw it as being a very useful framing
mechanism for the discussions that they wanted to have about power and states of stimulations and infringemental civil liberties and other perceived grievances.
So I know that there's been a debate within the climate movement for quite a while about whether or not climate should be connected to other social justice issues or this idea of like, look, climate is an intersectional issue. You don't necessarily get climate crisis without massive power and
balance that precedes it in all these other ways. And I don't know how people can sort of take this in from me and use it without being like, Okay, we need to start talking about those things because the rail is going to weaponize it.
Yeah, it's a really valid point, and I think to some extent, you know, the way that you're seeing is being co opted and weaponized within the culture wars in a more far right media ecosystem is sort of the reverse side of the coin of the climate justice movement, which is doing absolutely essential work in pointing out the intersectionality the inequities in our approach to the climate response, whether that's within countries or between the global North and
the global South, etc. My own personal take on this is that it's absolutely not about saying, oh, we need to disentangle climate from other contentious issues because they're holding climate back and we want to be as far removed from these other major battles of our time, like reproductive health rights or migration. And it's more pointing out the cynical and in many ways disingenuous use of moral panic
in other areas to drive opposition to climate action. So it's about pointing out and being really explicit in saying these actors are using racist rhetoric around Black lives matter, or the enormous moral panic that we're seeing in society around the trans community, as a point of entry to mobilize outrage and grievance in relation to climate change, right, And that is a deliberate tactic and it's part of their playbook, and it needs to be consciously challenged.
I wanted to ask you about the free speech stuff because I feel like this comes up all the time, and I really appreciated how it's dealt with this report, because I know in the US in particular, really any time you try to say anything about how disinformation needs to be dealt with, you immediately sort of get this, Well, we don't want to censor people, we don't want to
infringe on free speech rates and all of that. But I know this media exception thing shows up even in really tiny ways, like when Twitter tried to say they weren't going to allow political ads, the oil companies immediately just started working with media outlets to get their ads kind of smuggled in through media accounts. Anyway, So yeah, I'm curious, like what kind of of pushback you see using this kind of free speech argument.
I fully anticipate that the what the pushback is on the horizon, and any time that you try and draw
parameters around what isn't missed or disinformation. You are always going to have a body of people that claim this is about censoring certain opinions from public discourse, and I hope that the report is very clear in saying that firstly, this is not necessarily about content removal or even deplatforming, and that is very often the first line of attack that you get from actors in this space who are exercised about cancel culture and who try to distract from
the entire conversation by saying or they're trying to read everybody that they disagree with out of the Internet. We don't advocate for that at any point in this report, except where accounts are actively violating the platform's terms of service, which they define and they are perfectly within their rights to do as private companies, and we do encourage that if they're going to have those community guidelines in terms
of service in place, they should be enforced. Otherwise they are somewhat meaningless and don't produce the kind of value sets and architecture for their products and services that they intend.
But beyond that, what we're trying to emphasize is that there are so many mechanisms at our disposal, both as a society as regulators and policymakers, and as tech companies that can help to reduce the prominence and the impact of these patently misleading and false claims without telling people you're not allowed to have these opinions and you're not
allowed to say them anywhere on social media. To me, it's a false dichotomy, and it's used deliberately to make this a question about censorship rather than a question about algorithmic amplification, arout gaming of social media, about the monetization of myths and disinformation, about the opaqueness of the ad
tech industry, and all these other solvable problems. And I guess the neatest way to summarize how I feel about this, and I guess what is maybe more of a European approach enshrined in things like the Digital Services Act, is that freedom of speech is a fundamental pillar of liberal democracies and we should preserve it at all costs. And of course America has historically taken a more absolutist view
or purest view of what free speech entails. But free speech is not the same as freedom of reach right and your own ability to espouse an opinion. However, extreme However, unpalatable is totally different from being able to mobilize the biggest megaphones that exist in the modern world to get those opinions out to millions or hundreds of millions of people. And I think that we need to draw a clearer delineation between those two things.
There's something happening here where corporations have for a long time been on this path of continuously broadening their free speech rights, and that there's another kind of effort perfectively arguing to blur the line between fraud and free speech in a very concerning way. I'm curious what you think about how this plays into some of the organizations or corporations that might be funding and supporting disinformation, given that they kind of operate in a slightly different legal framework.
There are two elements of the way that corporate entities seem to be interacting with this issue across the digital ecosystem and not just social media platforms. The first is the ability of what we would call carbon majors, So these are the one hundred companies that are responsible for
around seventy percent of historic carbon emissions. Their ability to use products and services online to spread their greenwashing narratives and to mislead the public about what the viable solutions to let's say, mitigation and adaptation of climate change are
going forward. One of our partners called ecobotnet, did a study in the first nine months of twenty twenty one, and they found that just sixteen companies had posted seventeen hundred adverts to Facebook, which had garnered one hundred and fifty million impressions and more importantly, had generated nearly five million dollars worth of revenue for the parent company Meta. And that business model needs to be called out and
it needs to be undermined. We should not continue to allow actors who we know have been bad faith and indeed who are being asked to testify at congressional hearings in the US or hopefully in the hearings in the EU on their historic role in causing issues in the information space and delaying action and progress on climate Who shouldn't allow them to continue spreading content with impunity and using the huge amounts of financial resources at their disposal
to get undue oxygen. But that applies also to their known front groups and lobbyists, many of whom have very clear affiliations with industry and who have been exposed or
detailed by investigative journalists to date. The other side of this is the monetization that exists through the broader ad tech system online and the fact that many outlets who have a well known track record of spreading myths and or disinformation or active propaganda and hate speech are still able to generate revenue through adverts that appear on their websites or on their channels, and historically brands have claimed that they were ignorant of that fact or of where
their adverts were appearing. So you know, if you had something from to take a completely random example, you Unilever that was appearing next to a bright art article calling climate change of hopes, they might have said, because we have so little sense of what happens in between us using an ad tech system and where the final product
ends up, we didn't know that this was happening. I think now it's probably fair to say that it's either wilful or woeful ignorance on behalf of the private sector, and that there is also a lot of lobbying and advocacy that can and is being done by organizations like
check my Ads, The Conscious Advertising networks sleeping giants. That is saying you hold enormous leverage, financial leverage in this system, and if you are more stringent in the parameters of where you do and do not want your adverts to appear on what you think is acceptable, you have the opportunity to pull the rug out from under this entire
kaya business model of disinformation and propaganda. And there was one study done last year which estimated that two point six billion dollars a year is spent advertising on some of the worst perpetrators of missing disinformation. That's not sustainable going forward.
That's really interesting. I know, we definitely saw this culture war messaging around gas prices and the Russia Ukraine war here in the US. In that Influence Map study, I think they found that one of the top three messages was this like, you know, climate policy is something that only elite, woke liberals want and it's the thing that's
driving up gas prices and whatever. But I'm wondering if you have a sense of when exactly that messaging framework started to appear and if there was any kind of catalyst for it, or if it just sort of has slowly started to bubble up as a dominant message.
I think over probably the last decade, we have seen a broader societal and global level shift from what's often referred to as identity based polarization, so we hold polar opinions or stances on a particular issue, through to effective or identity based polarization, which is we might actually agree on the topic, but because I call myself X and you call yourself why, and we associate with different tribes, I automatically view myself in opposition and antagonism to you.
So I think that that's something which is well beyond climate. It's applying to almost every aspect of public life, but has unfortunately also seeped into and ended up dominating the
discussion around environmental issues. I see have only been doing research in this space for eighteen months, But one really acute example that I can give which shows how there is a lot of opportunism by adversary actors or those who oppose climate action, which is to piggyback on whatever else is happening in the news cycle in order to
insert their pre existing world views and stances. And one that we saw in the last couple of years is that right from the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic.
In March twenty twenty one, there were a number of individuals who were trying to land the idea of climate lockdown as a conspiracy, including a couple of actors associated with the Heartland Institute, where I'm sure many of your listeners will unfortunately be aware of the central hub and historic hub of climate denial climate skepticism, both in the US and transnationally.
Yeah, I remember seeing like Steve Molloy, for example.
So Steve Manoy, you know, was really committed. He was putting out to meet right from marchway twenty one. And unfortunately for Steve Malloy, he does not boast a great organic reach on Twitter.
I'm going to make him cry when he listen to this.
Sorry, really know that the data speaks to itself. He was getting two or three or retweets. However, by September twenty twenty one, an article was released by a very renowned economist called Marianna Mattakato which was looking at environmental issues in the context of COVID nineteen and saying the kind of mobilized systemic global response that we've had around this pandemic, why are we not replicating that sense of
urgency to climate change which poses an existential threat. And the article mentioned the language around climate lockdown, but not as something that in any way should be advocated. In fact, what the article was saying is if we don't take the necessary mitigation and adaptation steps, we may end up in a position where we don't have other options like
we've had with the pandemic. And this was the point where the conspiracy went from being something on the fringe that was really not gaining traction and was absolutely failing to become a phenomenon into something that was turbocharged into the mainstream and has now become a central conspiracy in a number of anti climate movements. And the reason, in part is because so many of these conspiracies rely on a perceived reactionary dynamic with the mainstream media. So they
saw this as perfect evidence. This provided the fodder or the grist to the mill for them to say, see, look, they've said the quiet part out loud. This pandemic is just a test bend for the kinds of green tyranny that is just looming on the horizon. And if you think that the kind of infringement on your civil liberties
that are happening now are bad. You should see what's going to happen when the great reset happens for climate change, and what was so depressing to watch happened in real time, and IC have produced a whole report that really forensically tracks the evolution of this conspiracy, of the way that it moved then from being on the fringes driven by a small set of actors, to being taken up by the right wing media ecosystem Fox News, etc. And where
it eventually ended up was in the QAnon telegram groups and the anti vaccination groups and the anti loocko on telegram groups, because it absolutely fit the same rhetorical and narrative frame, which is, you know, there are a group of people who are trying to take away your fundamental freedoms and change your life beyond all recognition. And it doesn't matter whether it's around public health or around environment.
This needs to be opposed at all costs. And so it was such a neatly articulated case study of piggybacking on the news and exploiting the fact that people have
real and genuine trauma in related to the pandemic. It's been an unbelievably distressing and difficult time for people around the globe, and lots of people do have legitimate grievances around the ways that their government have managed this pandemic and the kinds of measures that have been instituted, and they have cynically used that trauma to suddenly turn people against climate change as an issue and against climate action as a policy platform.
It's so interesting just the flow of information and the way that it moves. I have seen a tendency to silo climate disinformation out as like a a separate thing, even from the government here. It's like they'll have all these hearings about disinformation in general that's very focused on like electoral politics and social media platforms and whatever, and then they'll have this separate side thing for climate disinformation.
I'm just curious what you think about that. Why so many of the folks who have focused on disinformation kind of see climate as a whole separate thing.
I think one of the reasons is that, up until now, there has been a very poorly defined taxonomy of harm for climate disinformation. What I mean by that is that in other areas like public health or electoral integrity or you know, extreme hate speech. There is a clear through line, or a clearer through line between a piece of content online and the imminent harm that it can pose in
the real world. If somebody spreads information about a supposed cure for COVID nineteen and people take it and end up in a and E, that poses a real present danger for individuals and for society. If people spread false and misleading claims about an election being stolen, it can lead to an insurrection at the capitol, and so on
and so forth. And where bad actors in the climate space have been very clever is in keeping it abstract enough that it feels like it can't be acted upon because it doesn't have that through line to real world harm.
But I don't think that we can justify that anymore because the IPCC themselves, for the very first time this year, in their three thousand plus plage report on Climate Change in Mitigation, explicitly said that misleading content, including from industry actors and those with vested interests, had actively provided a block to achieve in climate action in line with the
goals of the Paris Agreement and with scientific consensus. So if you view as we all should, based on the scientific evidence that climate change is a ever present threat and indeed already having devastating impacts for communities all around the world, including in America. You know, we're not just talking about the global self here, we're talking about communities on your doorstep. Then we should be taking this content seriously.
So I think that's one of the reasons why it ends up being separated slightly, is that disinformation has been hard enough to mobilize a systemic response around in the first place, and people have been trying to focus on what they see as quote unquote the lowest hanging fruit, which is content that clearly has the potential for incitement to violence or causing harm at personal and a societal level.
The other reason is that I just don't think anyone was talking about this issue in a mainstreamed way as part of the climate response until maybe a year ago. And I'm relatively new to this space, and I'm not saying that climate organizations have not been banging the drum about nihilism since the eighties, but more that it wasn't necessarily a mainstream media conversation or something that was being
talked about within the political architecture. And indeed we've heard that from stakeholders and organizations like the unfrical C who run the climate summits in saying, you know, this really
was not on our radar until a year ago. That's wild, and we're so glad that it is now, because of course we were kind of obliquely aware of the problem, and we know that there have been people that have been trying to push this but actively drawing the link between the information ecosystem public mandates and the ability to achieve strong nationally determined contributions and multilateral climate agreements, I'm not sure that that equation had ever been completed.
Well, I think also, I mean, just speaking from my own experience, the mainstream media is very hesitant to cover this because they've been so comple listed in it. I wrote something for the washi In Post a few years ago about how the fossil feel industry had a real hand in creating false equivalents in general across the board, and my editor just sort of surgically removed any reference to anything that the Post themselves had also done in
the past. So I don't even know if it's like cognizant or intentional, but they're very hesitant to run anything that you know, might implicate some of their own coverage.
There is also a lot of cognitive dissonance or disparity within publications to this very day. Yes, I know, you can have outlets whose main editorial stance is absolutely recognizing the climate crisis, trying to put out nuanced journalism that talks about the level of urgency and the kinds of good faith debates that need to happen in order to
implement climate policy that is appropriate for a given country. Who, at the same time will allow the fossil fuel industry to take out entire page adverts or and this is really really key, will allow climate deniers to post things in their editorial and their op ed pages right, And the amount of disparity that you see between breaking news coverage or sort of general reporting versus the op ed pages is absolutely staggering. My colleague Phil, he has absolutely
dogged on this. The man is a machine. He has a running spreadsheet that looks at every single op ed on climate that has run in the Wall Street Journal from the nineteen nineties to now. And this figure is something like, I apologize if I slightly miscreat this, but in the ballpark of there have only ever been around ten op eds and that entire time that actually acknowledged the link between fossil fuels and climate changes are phenomenon.
Wow, I wish I could say I'm surprised. You know. The sad thing about the Wall Street Journal too, is that pre Rupert Murdoch, they were like the biggest pain in the oil industry's ass. I mean, Mobile Oil in the eighties actually banned the Wall Street Journal from getting their press releases or talking to any of their executives because they were so mad about how critical the Wall Street Journal was being of the oil industry.
And now you know, at Cock twenty six, what did they do. They gave Beyond Longblog his own special column, and even exactly in that column there was an editor's note that talked about how pure Lomborg was a neutral adjudicator in this discussion and was providing data based journalism in order to help the public navigate this really complex topic.
I mean, you just as fair, because the thing is they are seen as a credible outlet, and you know, in so many other aspects of their reporting, they are the work that Jeff Orowitz and this team have done on social media platform accountability and the Facebook files absolutely extraordinary and very relevant to the report that we've just released.
You know, we cite them a number of times, but we also have an entire section of the report that profiles the Wall Street Journal and the role they're playing in climate skepticism. So it's not consistent.
Both your Lumberger and Michael Schollenberger have this thing, and the Canada Greenpeace guy Patrick Moore Patrick Well, to me, I'm like, oh my god, this is just right out of the right wing playbook too, of like the reformed environmentalist. They love a black man who hates civil rights too, or a woman who's anti abortion, But in climate in particular,
it does seem to lend this kind of credibility. And I think that the message of like, oh, sure it's a thing, but it's not that bad, it's way more harmful than saying, oh, it's not happening at all.
Of course, And think how successful that is and how powerful that can be as an argument for a couple
of different reasons. The first is that these people absolutely lean into and create them brands around the idea that they are sober rationalist intellectuals and that they don't come with any sort of agenda on climate, but that they are fiscal pragmatists is very often kind of language that you'll see being used, and that they are neutral commentators on what is happening in the climate policy space, which is somewhat difficult to pass when you look at the
fact that they also run organizations called things like the Co two Coalition, which claim that carbon should be celebrated because it enhances our lives and has improved the environment.
Grows more appliance.
Yeah, it's also really interesting to see that this veneer of academical or scientific credibility, which is touted by by all three of the names that you've mentioned, but Patrick Moore in particular always harks back to his previous affiliation with Greenpeace.
But Greenpeace themselves have put out an absolutely unequivocal statement that both fact checks the level or that the role that More played within the organization decades ago, but also have completely distanced themselves from his current stances and outputs on climate. And yet you know, he relies on the fact that people won't do their due diligence, and all they'll see is, oh, this is a person who says he used to be the co founder of Greenpeace, so
I should trust what he says. It's a very savvy way of gaming the media landscape. It allows them to get continually platformed in the mainstream media, which is infuriating in the extreme because I don't know how many more times we need to document their financial or other affiliations with historic polluters, denialists, other unsavory and unbalidable characters. But
clearly that efforts is not over. What we need to remove is basically the social license for these people to use or try and claim association degree movements when they are entirely going against the current scientific consensus. And what bodies like the IPCC and the un tricle C that I will size are bodies that almost every country around the world have signed onto and who have to approve the reports and the documents that come out. So these
are not isolated bodies associated with one particular country. And say, why are we still treating these people as if they are credible spokesman. They're not, And every time that they appear in public life, we need to have some sort of counter effort that just re emphasizes look what these people were saying ten years ago. They were denialists, They now realize that denihalism is not a very useful tactic in public life, so they've shifted to delayism. Don't take
them at their word. These people are committed to maintaining the status quo, and they will use whatever argument seems to have traction at a particular point in time, and they are lurking on the margins constantly for those points of entry provided by as I said before, the news cycle or the particular hot button issue or corese celebra at any given time to remake in a different form the same arguments that they've been using for fifteen years.
In Schellenberger's case, and that now I'm seeing Mark Morano do this to this thing of calling themselves journalists now as a way to legitimize themselves. And I wonder if that's something that you've seen either amongst some of these other actors or in other realms of disinformation.
Yes. Absolutely, And this is part of the reason why we cautioned against these all out media exemptions being enshrined in tech regulation, because very often the definitions of what isn't journalism are quite blurred, and some of the policy that we are seeing being debated, for example, the online safety.
But in the UK I think could pose a large number of issues in people calling themselves citizen journalists and therefore under the wording of these policies claiming exemption from any kind of content moderation or punitive action against their
accounts and when they violate terms of service. So again, it's a tactic, partly as a way of laundering their image and making them seem more credible, but also it's kind of casting their minds ahead to how can we avoid any scrutiny for what we're doing in the future by using the language of being a media outlet or being a journalist to escape repercussions for our actions.
That's so interesting. I do sometimes wonder if some of these contrariants do they even have a driving political ideology or is this just like a handy way to make money.
That's kind of the million dollar question, isn't it. I'm not sure I have the answer. I feel as though if you look at some of these actors, it's difficult to make the argument that they are not entirely cynical and just using whatever tools are at their disposal to create the most incendary and sensationist content drive as much traffic as possible to their channels and to their products and their services, and therefore generate as much revenue as possible.
But I do also believe that some of these people have completely drunk the call aid, whether it's their cooler or others, and do honestly believe that climate changes, I don't know, not a problem, or that the fossil fuel industry is going to solve it all with unsubstantiated technologies like carbon capture and storage, and that none of us need to worry because if we leave the free market to solve the issue, we'll be fine.
That's it for this time, Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.