Towards Designing Social Interventions For Online Climate Change Denialism Discussions
Ruican Zhong, Shruti Phadke, Beth Goldberg, Tanushree Mitra

TL;DR
This study develops a framework using insider language and AI to deliver evidence-based interventions in online climate change denial communities, fostering positive engagement and open discussions.
Contribution
It introduces a novel AI-driven approach for automatically delivering evidence-based social interventions in conspiracy theory communities on Reddit.
Findings
Evidence-based interventions with neutral language increase positive engagement.
Climate supporters actively participate and provide additional evidence.
Interventions can be effectively delivered via transparent bot accounts.
Abstract
As conspiracy theories gain traction, it has become crucial to research effective intervention strategies that can foster evidence and science-based discussions in conspiracy theory communities online. This study presents a novel framework using insider language to contest conspiracy theory ideology in climate change denialism on Reddit. Focusing on discussions in two Reddit communities, our research investigates reactions to pro-social and evidence-based intervention messages for two cohorts of users: climate change deniers and climate change supporters. Specifically, we combine manual and generative AI-based methods to craft intervention messages and deploy the interventions as replies on Reddit posts and comments through transparently labeled bot accounts. On the one hand, we find that evidence-based interventions with neutral language foster positive engagement, encouraging open…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
