Big Tech’s Climate Wrecks On The Way To COP29

11 November, Baku – As the annual UN climate negotiations begin today, for the third year in a row hosted by a petrostate with a questionable human rights record, the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD) is releasing Extreme Weather, Extreme Content: How Big Tech Enables Climate Disinformation in a World on the Brink. The report demonstrates how social media companies have failed to protect the public from “super-spreaders” of false narratives, while also taking millions from Big Oil to run fossil fuel propaganda advertisements reinforcing demand for climate-changing activities.

"It is virtually certain that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, and extreme weather--heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, drought--has again wreaked havoc around the world” said Kate Cell of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “As this report shows, the fossil fuel industry and its political allies are wielding climate disinformation to maintain their profits and lock the world’s people into an increasingly dangerous future. Just as we must act swiftly to reduce global warming emissions, we must act swiftly to stop Big Tech from enabling and profiting from climate disinformation."

Information integrity can be improved by efforts like the UN Global Principles and the Global Digital Compact, and legislation like the EU’s Digital Services Act that help address climate disinformation in a holistic and meaningful manner, while also pursuing important efforts to remove the economic incentive to spread disinformation.

Key Takeaways:

• 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. One such X/Twitter user has seen a 1750x increase in followers since March 2023.
• Disinformation operations like the allegedly Russia-funded Tenent media are exploiting extreme weather events to fuel opposition to climate policies, and recently, has caused threats of violence against emergency response personnel.
• Eight fossil fuel advertisers paid Meta at least $17.6 million for over 700 million impressions over the past year.

"For the third year running, CAAD has documented millions of dollars of fossil fuel advertising around COP," said CAAD Intelligence Unit Coordinator Sean Buchan. “While the world meets to try to keep the Paris Agreement promise, the fossil fuel industry pollutes the information ecosystem to cloud our minds. A fossil fuel ad ban is imperative to protect public health and accelerate climate action."

Over the course of 2024, multiple extreme weather events, all over the world, had two things in common: the events were made worse by climate change, and the public response was hampered by the spread of false content online. From conspiracy theories about wildfires being used to clear land for renewables to viral claims that resulted in US Federal Emergency Management Agency workers being hunted by those they’re saving, the threat of letting disinformation spread unchecked is undeniable.

While past climate communications efforts have assumed that an increased awareness of extreme weather events and climate change would naturally lead to an increase in concern about climate change, Big Oil and Big Tech are instead facilitating an ongoing reframing of those events, turning them into fodder for opposition to climate action.

At the same time, social media companies are also reducing transparency by shutting down access to data and making it more difficult for research efforts to even quantify the size and scale of the disinformation problem on their platforms, leaving policymakers increasingly in the dark on the problem.

With Extreme Weather, Extreme Content, CAAD is making it clear that the digital information landscape is dangerously polluted, and will keep getting worse until we hold Big Tech accountable for letting Big Oil and disinformers spread harmful false content.

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