“If someone is manipulating the messages that we consume online then there is reason to be concerned they are changing people’s perceptions and beliefs.”
“My life on Twitter everyday,” teen climate activist Alexandria Villaseñor posted on Twitter the other day, after coming across a BBC story about a Brown University study that shows the climate conversation on social media is being shaped and manipulated by an army of automated bots.
That same day, The Guardian’s Oliver Milman, crunching the same numbers, found that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots.
The climate conversation is being distorted — no surprise there — in favour of climate-science denial. Brown University researchers analyzed millions of tweets in the days before and after the currently serving president of the United States announced US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, in June, 2017.
The study found that the vast majority of bots applauded the president for his decision while at the same time spreading misinformation about the science. Perhaps it might be time to add climate science to the Endangered Species Act.
Bots, for the uninitiated, are a type of software that can autonomously tweet, retweet and message directly on Twitter, while pretending to be a legitimate account fronted by a living, breathing person. Put another way, bots are computer programs that can masquerade as humans to post or send messages on social media.
The Brown study found that 38% of tweets about “fake science” — which is not a thing, since science is rooted in fact, not opinion — were generated by bots. Bots were deemed responsible for 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis, and are a major reason why the hashtags #hoax and #fakenews trend on any given day.
This wasn’t an easy task. The researchers examined more than 6 million tweets posted over a period of several days, even as the president — ever articulate — used words like “hoax” and “bullshit” to dismiss climate activists.
The climate debate shouldn’t be a debate at all, since the science is in and, as a general rule, it’s pretty hard to argue with science.
One can argue with interpretation, but facts are facts: Temperature models over the past several years show a significant increase in temperatures, not the other way round.
Whether one chooses to blame that on industrialization and fossil fuels — i.e. human activity — or space aliens knocking planet Earth off its axis with a steady bombardment of gamma rays, the fact is that the climate is changing, and not for the betterment of polar bears in the Arctic or koala bears in Australia.
Bots are not the same as trolls, though they often work together. A troll is someone who deliberately leaves an insulting or offensive message on social media with the express intention of upsetting someone, gaining attention or causing trouble — or all three. A troll can use a bot, but it would take a special kind of bot indeed to use a troll.
Numbers don’t always tell the whole truth, but they don’t lie, either. The number of posts by bots rose from hundred per day to more than 25,000 per day in the days directly surrounding the announcement of US withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
Does any of this matter? Well, actually, yes. Social media has become our town crier. When serious news breaks — the COVID19 coronavirus outbreak, for example — roughly two-thirds of adults now find out about it online, in real time. That leaves little time for fact-checking or doing one’s due diligence. The conversation becomes rife with false claims, misinformation and conspiracy theories. Much of this is down to confusion that naturally surrounds any rapidly unfolding situation. Increasingly, though, bots are shown to be acting as part of a carefully orchestrated campaign with sinister ulterior motives, deeply rooted and malevolent. Twitter’s immediacy means bold assertions and unsourced hypotheses spread much faster than actual news. Prodigious retweeting by automated accounts — those bots, again — accelerates the process.
Seeing is not always believing, especially if you’re online. Sometimes it’s better to look out the window or, better yet, go outside, to see if it’s snowing or not.
Villaseñor earned her climate-activist bonafides little more than a year ago when, at age 14, she staged a one-person climate strike outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, on a midwinter morning and afternoon. It snowed that day. Hard.
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