"New research highlights companies’ “aligned and coordinated” use of Twitter to deny climate change and delay solutions."
"To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.”
“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston."
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