Burning forests, bots and climate change attitudes: a study of the global diffusion dynamics of mis- and disinformation about prominent forest fires

Social media plays a fundamental role by supporting the global exchange of information and debate.

However, this new digital information landscape is also affected by the abundant spread of misinformation, including hoaxes, conspiracy theories, click-bait headlines, and junk science.

Such diffusion of misinformation could have detrimental impacts on the capacity of policy-makers to respond swiftly in a coordinated fashion during major environmental emergencies.

The following project will explore the diffusion of various forms of content pollution, misinformation and disinformation on environmental emergencies in social media, including the contested role of so called "social bots".

We will focus on large-scale forest fire emergencies as examples where the social media platform Twitter not only has long been used for emergency communication, but also facilitates and documents intense public debates about climate change.

We plan to analyze over 8 million tweets, in four strategically selected cases: the Amazon fires in 2019, the forest fires in California in 2018, and in Australia in 2019-2020 respectively.

The project will a) analyze the effects of social bots on information diffusion online; b) the behavioral patterns and impact of these social bots along different time scales; c) their influence on social media users; and d) the development of methods and generic metrics that allow for the early detection and response to misinformation diffusion.