Emma Longo (COM’24) analyzed native advertising from fossil fuel companies for how they are trying to affect the public response to climate change.

Climate Change

COM Student’s UROP Climate Project Lands Her a Trip to Washington

Emma Longo’s paper on misinformation and native advertising led to a chance to present at a conference this weekend

A story in the New York Times touts Exxon Mobil’s work growing algae for biofuel as an alternative to oil and gas. A handsomely illustrated story in the Washington Post looks at alternative sources of power for automobiles, with concerned-sounding quotes from a Shell executive.

Just one problem, though. These weren’t actual news stories, but advertisements for the two fossil fuel companies, carefully calibrated to give them an eco-friendly image while climate change ravages the earth.

The casual reader could easily mistake the two stories for real news, missing the small-type disclaimers: “Paid Post” and “WP Creative Group—Content from Shell.” 

“So you see a native ad, and you think, oh, my gosh, that’s so great. Exxon Mobil is going clean, they’re going sustainable. As a consumer, you might be excited about that. And it’s in the New York Times, so you might trust that,” says media studies student Emma Longo (COM’24). “But when it comes down to it, you’re being lied to.”

Longo analyzed the two ads for her Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project, and it’s now bringing her a rare honor for an undergraduate. She’ll present her paper on August 8 in a poster session at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Washington, D.C.

“In an era of climate change,” Longo says, “when we’re seeing the hottest days on record last week, we’re seeing flooding, we’re seeing drought, we’re seeing wildfires, it’s really unethical to make those claims and to put them in credible media outlets for consumers to assume that they’re doing something good for the planet when they’re not.” 

“What she has a finger on is how the media is complicit in misinforming and disinforming audiences about what’s happening with climate,” says Michelle Amazeen, a College of Communication associate professor and director of the Communication Research Center, who advised Longo on the paper. “Specifically, in this case, speaking on behalf of fossil fuel companies. These news organizations created these ads that look like news articles. They’re very deceptive. A lot of people don’t realize what they’re reading is commercial content.

“And the claims that are in these articles are misleading as well,” she says. “For instance, leading people to believe that Exxon Mobil is doing far more. Algae production efforts and using algae to create renewable energies. And what they don’t say is, that’s roughly .00001 percent of what they’re doing.”

Presenting at AEJMC is “a really big deal,” Amazeen says.

AEJMC is a nonprofit educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals with a mission to promote standards for journalism and mass communication education and “cultivate the widest possible range of communication research,” as its website says.

“It’s mostly faculty, and there will be some graduate students, but it would be very rare to find any undergraduate students there,” Amazeen says. “So [Longo] should be very proud. I’m proud of her. She’s done an amazing job.”

It all started when Longo arrived as a transfer student and took Amazeen’s Understanding Media class last year. “She spoke about climate, myths, and disinformation,” Longo says. “I kept asking her, throughout the course of the semester, many times, like annoying her, ‘Are there any research opportunities?’”

Eventually Amazeen brought Longo on as a student researcher for a project on the threat of climate change disinformation, which brought together faculty members from COM, the College of Engineering, and Metropolitan College, sponsored by BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability. “She basically told me, ‘You’re gonna research native advertisements,’” Longo says, “and I’m like, ‘Okay, what are those?’”

Native ads are, as BU Today writer Rich Barlow notes in a story about the project, “advertising gussied up to look like news stories.” Native ads are paid for—and their content controlled by—the advertisers. They are usually created by newspaper staffers in a department separate from the newsroom and devoted to what is also called “sponsored content.”

Readers, however, often miss the small print notifying them that what they are reading is sponsored content, and even if they notice, that characterization doesn’t make clear the nature of the content.

“It’s small and it’s hard to read and it’s, you know, in a light font,” Amazeen says. “It’s not very prominent, and research over and over has demonstrated that people either don’t see or don’t understand what these disclosures mean.”

Journalists often resent seeing sponsored content in their publications, but it has grown in importance financially for many newspapers, as the industry is in slow-motion collapse. “Ad revenue has gone off a cliff,” Amazeen says. “Legacy news organizations, but also the digital start-ups—all of them are struggling to generate revenue.” These deceptive ad practices bring in some dollars, so they keep doing them, even though the ads often violate the spirit, if not the letter, of industry ethics codes.

“What was really interesting to me that I found out is that the New York Times has had native ads sponsored by the fossil fuel industry since the 1970s,” Longo says.”We kind of studied how a lot of the goals [in the ads] are very vague. What does ‘carbon positive’ mean? What does ‘carbon neutral’ mean? What does ‘carbon negative’ mean? And they’re all just marketing? 

“I looked into who they were citing, and a lot of times, it was their own CEOs. A lot of times it was economists. They cited data from the UN, and the World Health Organization, and some credible sustainability organizations, but they were never directly quoting from it—it was all kind of paraphrasing. And obviously, anyone with critical thinking skills knows that you can say information in a way that” bends the truth. 

“In a world where the health of the planet and its inhabitants are at stake,” Longo’s paper says, “it is essential to understand how fossil fuel companies portray climate issues and shape environmental narratives.”

“She’s done an amazing job,” Amazeen says. “She and I are going to continue working on revising the paper based upon the feedback she receives from the conference, and we’ll submit it for publication in an academic journal. Which will be great if she can get that published, because she’s interested in a career in academia.”

Longo graduates in January, and will be applying to master’s programs in journalism. “I’d like to focus on science communication, and particularly climate communication,” she says. “And, you know, the role of fossil fuel companies in that. So I’d like to stay in Boston; there’s a lot of great schools here. So we’ll see.”

The climate crisis is an enormous, global phenomenon with many parts and many interested players. Can one student make a difference?

“My mom asked me the same question,” Longo says. “She’s in finance, and she’s more conservative than I am. And she’s a very pragmatic person. But she’s pro climate. And she said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to fight the good fight.’ I figure I’m only alive for a certain amount of time. And I just think it’s really sad what’s happening. And I would feel morally wrong if I didn’t do it.”