{"id":15077,"date":"2023-05-15T18:19:09","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T22:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/?page_id=15077"},"modified":"2023-06-23T15:46:10","modified_gmt":"2023-06-23T19:46:10","slug":"twitter","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/research\/climate-disinformation-initiative\/twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"How Climate Disinformation Spreads: Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative<\/h3>\n<h4>Research Theme | How climate disinformation spreads through social media sites: Twitter<\/h4>\n<p><em>Research goal: To build a catalog of prominent narratives of disinformation about climate change circulating on Twitter and Reddit; to identify major accounts promoting disinformation and the networks of which they are a part; to model shifting patterns of climate disinformation around key events during 2022-2023.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Dis- and misinformation about climate change have been created and spread on Twitter, a social media platform on which accounts follow others and engage in posts across diverse topics.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/climate-lies.sail.codes\/\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative is focusing on the following three sources to identify dis- and misinformation about climate change and accounts creating and consuming them on Twitter.<\/p>\n<h4>Source 1: Organizations funded by ExxonMobil<\/h4>\n<p>ExxonMobil, a big oil and gas company, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.abk0063\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">falsely reported risks of global warming, though its scientists correctly forecasted climate change<\/a><sup>1<\/sup>. However, interestingly on Twitter, it seems that ExxonMobil does not make any false statements. There is still a possibility that ExxonMobil indirectly spreads dis- and misinformation about climate change through funding to other entities. The research team analyzed tweets of 50 organizations funded by ExxonMobil and clustered tweets after converting texts into numeric vectors. It captured two clusters requiring further investigation. These clusters\u2019 main narratives are \u201cClimate change is not threatening\u201d and \u201cBiden\u2019s energy plan hurts economic growth\u201d. The Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research are major contributors.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/UMAP-visualization-636x380.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-15083\" width=\"636\" height=\"380\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/UMAP-visualization-636x380.png 636w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/UMAP-visualization-768x459.png 768w, https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/UMAP-visualization.png 975w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>View poster on <a href=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/06\/P2-Climate-Change-Narratives-of-Organizations-Funded-by-ExxonMobil.pdf\">Climate Change Narratives of Organizations Funded by ExxonMobil<\/a> displayed at the Taking on Climate Lies symposium in May 2023.<\/p>\n<h4>Source 2: Community Notes<\/h4>\n<p>Community Notes is Twitter&#8217;s collaborative fact-checking approach. Twitter users can sign up for this system and then write notes to tweets suspected of having dis- and misinformation and rate notes with labels, such as helpful, somewhat helpful, and not helpful. Notes and ratings are publicly available on its site. About 0.6% of tweets checked by Community Notes are about climate change and 11% of them contain dis- and misinformation (from the data on October 23, 2022). The research team collected information about retweeters of these dis- and misinformation tweets to find retweeters\u2019 common characteristics. Several communities of retweeters were extracted from followerships. These communities seem to use right-wing keywords, including \u201cconservative\u201d, \u201cfreedom\u201d, and \u201cgod\u201d, in the account profile section.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/Community-notes.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-15081\" width=\"624\" height=\"408\" \/><\/p>\n<h4>Source 3: Contrarian claims about climate change<\/h4>\n<p>Coan et al. (2021) <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41598-021-01714-4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">developed a list of claims about climate change commonly used by conservative think tanks and contrarian blogs<\/a><sup>2<\/sup>. The research team hypothesized that tweets similar to these contrarian claims are likely to contain dis- and misinformation. To test it, researchers first collected tweets having keywords used in claims. Note that these tweets do not necessarily contain contrarian claims because keywords can be combined in different ways. Keywords used in the claim \u201cclimate impacts are not bad &#8211; only a few degrees\u201d appear most frequently in tweets. Next, we calculated similarities between claims and the collected tweets. Students in two sections of BU Metropolitan College were invited to label tweets highly similar to claims as misinformation or correct information. Over 30% of the selected tweets were labeled as misinformation, suggesting that this approach scales up dis- and misinformation searches.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/Contrarian-claims1.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-15088\" width=\"624\" height=\"255\" \/><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/05\/Contrarian-claims2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-15089\" width=\"624\" height=\"184\" \/><\/p>\n<p>View poster on <a href=\"\/igs\/files\/2023\/06\/P1-Assessing-the-Veracity-of-Climate-Change-Information-on-Twitter.pdf\">Assessing the Veracity of Climate Change Information on Twitter<\/a> displayed at the Taking on Climate Lies symposium in May 2023.<\/p>\n<h4>Research Theme Champions<\/h4>\n\n\t<ul class=\"profile-listing profile-format-advanced\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\n<li class=\"profile-item profile-item-advanced has-title post-10974 profile type-profile status-publish hentry\">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/profile\/hyunuk-kim\/\" class=\"profile-link profile-link-advanced\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"profile-photo profile-photo-advanced\"><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2022\/05\/Kim-thumb.jpg\" alt=\"Headshot for Hyunuk Kim\" \/><\/figure>\t\t\t\t<h6 class=\"profile-name profile-name-advanced\">Hyunuk Kim<\/h6>\n\t\t<p class=\"profile-title profile-title-advanced\">Assistant Professor, Department of Administrative Sciences, Metropolitan College<\/p>\t<\/a>\n\n\t\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\n<li class=\"profile-item profile-item-advanced has-title post-10971 profile type-profile status-publish hentry\">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/profile\/gianluca-stringhini\/\" class=\"profile-link profile-link-advanced\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"profile-photo profile-photo-advanced\"><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2022\/05\/Screenshot-2024-04-08-at-1.37.16\u202fPM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Headshot of Gianluca Stringhini\" \/><\/figure>\t\t\t\t<h6 class=\"profile-name profile-name-advanced\">Gianluca Stringhini<\/h6>\n\t\t<p class=\"profile-title profile-title-advanced\">Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering<\/p>\t<\/a>\n\n\t\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\n<li class=\"profile-item profile-item-advanced has-title post-10963 profile type-profile status-publish hentry igs-affiliation-affiliated igs-affiliation-faculty\">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/profile\/irena-vodenska\/\" class=\"profile-link profile-link-advanced\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"profile-photo profile-photo-advanced\"><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"\/igs\/files\/2022\/05\/Screenshot-2024-04-08-at-1.53.59\u202fPM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Headshot of Irena Vodenska\" \/><\/figure>\t\t\t\t<h6 class=\"profile-name profile-name-advanced\">Irena Vodenska<\/h6>\n\t\t<p class=\"profile-title profile-title-advanced\">Affiliated Faculty, IGS;<br \/>\r\nProfessor of Finance, Director of Finance Programs, and Chair of Administrative Sciences, Metropolitan College<\/p>\t<\/a>\n\n\t\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t<\/ul>\n\t\n<hr \/>\n<h4>References<\/h4>\n<ol>\n<li>Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., &amp; Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil\u2019s global warming projections. <em>Science<\/em>, 379(6628), eabk0063.<\/li>\n<li>Coan, T. G., Boussalis, C., Cook, J., &amp; Nanko, M. O. (2021). Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change. <em>Scientific Reports<\/em>, 11(1), Article 1.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative Research Theme | How climate disinformation spreads through social media sites: Twitter Research goal: To build a catalog of prominent narratives of disinformation about climate change circulating on Twitter and Reddit; to identify major accounts promoting disinformation and the networks of which they are a part; to model shifting patterns [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15764,"featured_media":0,"parent":15109,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15077"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15417,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15077\/revisions\/15417"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}