Study suggests Twitter bots have 'substantial Impact' on spreading climate misinformation

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.  A new analysis of 6.5 million tweets from the days before and after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to ditch the Paris agreement in June 2017 suggests that automated Twitter bots are substantially contributing to the spread of online misinformation about the climate crisis.  Brown University researchers "found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science," according to the Guardian, which first reported on the draft study Friday. "Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like, or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account."Advertisement:  As the Guardian summarized:  More broadly, the study adds, "these findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement."  Thomas Marlow, the Brown Ph.D. candidate who led the study, told the Guardian that his team decided to conduct the research because they were "always kind of wondering why there's persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on." Marlow expressed surprise that a full quarter of climate-related tweets were from bots. "I was like, 'Wow that seems really high,'" he said.Advertisement:  In response to the Guardian report, some climate action advocacy groups reassured followers that their tweets are written by humans:  Other climate organizations that shared the Guardian's report on Twitter weren't surprised by the results of the new research:  "The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had around the often fraught climate debate," the Guardian noted. "However, a number of suspected bots that have consistently disparaged climate science and activists have large numbers of followers on Twitter."Advertisement:  Cognitive scientist John Cook, who has studied online climate misinformation, told the Guardian that bots are "dangerous and potentially influential" because previous research has shown "not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts."  As Cook, a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, put it: "This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots."Advertisement:  Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard University professor and science historian who also has studied climate misinformation, including an October 2019 report (pdf) co-authored by Cook about the

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