Meta alone made millions in 2022 from ads laundering fossil fuel companies. Twitter isn’t far behind: According to research, the social network has literally exploded in the last year with posts on this topic.

Who will be blamed?

Researchers found that fossil fuel companies spent nearly $4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads during the UN climate change conference in November. While these ads discredit the transition to clean energy needed to slow climate change, these ads portray oil and gas companies as green. Meanwhile, the hashtag #climatescam has seen a surge in usage on Twitter since July.

All of this shows a “dramatic return to climate change denial” and “neglect” by major tech companies, who not only continue to monetize and allow, but in some cases actively recommend this type of content to users.
– write in the report.

The report analyzes 850 advertisers on Facebook and Instagram from September 1 to November 23. It was a critical time for global climate action. World leaders met at the UN climate conference in Egypt in November. It was hoped that they would come up with strong new agreements to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but in the end almost nothing came of it. The fossil fuel industry sent many of its delegates to talks and had a large online presence.

• It has made a significant contribution to discrediting the efforts of scientists, ecologists, and governments. Energy Citizens, a panel of the American Petroleum Institute. It was the most publicized of the period under review, focusing on fueling fears that the clean energy transition is threatening America’s “energy security.” The reality is different: annual extreme weather events are exacerbated by climate change, leading to an increase in power outages in the US due to heat and frost, drought and floods, and increasingly powerful hurricanes and storms.
• Heartland InstituteIn November, a think tank attacking mainstream climate science ran a misleading ad that claimed scientists refuted 97% of previous climate research.
• Society “American Plastic Manufacturers” spent $1.1 million on climate-related advertising campaigns. This fueled the myth that recycling solves the problem of plastic waste. In fact, plastic is quite difficult to reuse. Only 9 percent of all plastic waste in the world is recycled.

The new report also confirms previous research on the rise of climate misinformation on Twitter. The hashtag #climatescam popped up “suddenly” in July, and by the end of the year, very few events had reached hundreds of thousands of mentions. The term continues to appear among the first suggestions on Twitter when users search for the term “climate.”

The source of its virality is completely obscure and reiterates the need for transparency about how and why platforms display content to users.
– say researchers, referring to the completely incomprehensible algorithms of social networks.

Since Elon Musk owns Twitter, the social network has seen a surge in all sorts of previously banned content, from hate speech to conspiracy theories. Browsing #climatescam, one encounters the misconceptions of describing climate change as “a fictitious disaster that globalists/socialists use to instill fear and guilt, tax, regulate and take away our freedoms while pretending to save the planet”. Social media’s failure to tackle content that denies accepted scientific evidence risks undermining real action that could prevent deepening climate disasters.