In mid-November, Alex Armstrong, a right-wing British TV personality, tweeted a picture over an announcement that the Taliban would attend the COP29 negotiations in Baku. The image features Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero of the United Kingdom, grinning as he gazes off-camera, handing a wad of (American) cash over to a figure with a long beard, wearing an Afghan-style turban and clutching a machine gun. While the image is clearly AI-generated, it was allowed to spread with no labels on X, eventually reaching nearly 500 likes and more than 200 reposts that reinforced the longstanding disinformation narrative that climate policy is a ruse to redistribute wealth.
While generative AI makes it easier than ever to create evidence to support climate lies online, politically it’s also a turbulent time to be standing up for climate truth. The election of Donald Trump in early November has once again placed a climate denier in charge of US policy, while Elon Musk’s purchase and total capture of X, formerly known as Twitter, has amplified misinformation and propaganda, pushing it to spread like wildfire across the platform. Meanwhile, actual wildfires are raging around the globe as the world’s temperatures passed 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels for the first time this year.
Which is why, experts say, that it’s crucial that the world’s climate leaders play close attention to how disinformation about climate spreads online. Ahead of the start of COP29 last week, more than 50 organisations and more than 40 experts signed an open letter calling for action to address climate disinformation.
A report released ahead of Baku earlier this month from Climate Action Against Disinformation paints a grim picture of how tech companies are helping to supercharge disinformation online, finding that disinformation operations are taking advantage of lax moderation policies to spread lies about renewable energy and sow doubt in climate science behind extreme weather events. As the online ecosystem is destroyed, oil and gas companies are pouring money into the world’s top social media companies, meeting little in ways of controls or fact-checks. The CAAD report found that just 8 oil companies paid Meta at least $17.6 million for over 700 million impressions over the past year alone.
In the letter, released last week and organised by Climate Action Against Disinformation, the signees call on governments to take a variety of measures to hold tech platforms accountable for their role, including acknowledging the disinformation crisis, create transparent methods for outside observers to assess what the company is doing to stop it, prevent the monetization of disinformation, and address emerging threats such as AI.
“Disinformation distorts our understanding of reality, putting people and organisations at risk and harming public policies,” the letter states. “We cannot let these falsehoods weaken climate action and hinder progress.”
Signers of the letter include the Union of Concerned Scientists, regional groups of the WWF and Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth.
Brazil, which is hosting the G20 this weekend as well as the incoming COP20 presidency, has been a particularly strong leader in this effort. The country is helping to spearhead a global misinformation initiative with the UN to the fight against disinformation; Marina Silva, the country’s Environment Minister, shared the open letter last week to social media.
“The alliance of so many Brazilian institutes and professionals shows the urgency for answers and the intersectoral power of this Brazilian network, willing to work together,” Thais Lazzeri, founder of Brazilian impact studio FALA, a signatory to the letter, told DeSmog about the open letter. “At the opening of the Brazil space at CO29, [Silva] said that denialism doesn’t fit. The Brazilian government can lead by example and guarantee information integrity policies and strategic, connected actions to change the game.”
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