Climate Change Conspiracy Theories on Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes climate change conspiracy theories on Twitter, revealing that skeptics predominantly share such content and that different theories vary in popularity, impacting climate communication strategies.

Contribution

It applies a novel stance detection method to identify and compare the prevalence of conspiracy theories among climate change believers and disbelievers on social media.

Findings

Disbelievers share more conspiracy-related messages.

Not all conspiracy theories are equally popular.

Popularity of theories varies with climate change belief.

Abstract

One of the critical emerging challenges in climate change communication is the prevalence of conspiracy theories. This paper discusses some of the major conspiracy theories related to climate change found in a large Twitter corpus. We use a state-of-the-art stance detection method to find whether conspiracy theories are more popular among Disbelievers or Believers of climate change. We then analyze which conspiracy theory is more popular than the others and how popularity changes with climate change belief. We find that Disbelievers of climate change are overwhelmingly responsible for sharing messages with conspiracy theory-related keywords, and not all conspiracy theories are equally shared. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for climate change communication.