Relative engagement with sources of climate misinformation is growing across social media platforms

We explore the discourse on climate change across multiple social media platforms, examining the evolution of user engagement with climate-related content and whether this content links to reliable or unreliable news media sources. Through a detailed examination of over 20 million posts on Facebook,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 18629 - 15
Main Authors: Storani, Saverio, Falkenberg, Max, Quattrociocchi, Walter, Cinelli, Matteo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 28.05.2025
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio
Subjects:
639/705/117
639/766/530/2801
704/106
Climate action
Climate Change
Communication
Evolution
False information
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Social interactions
Social Media
Social networks
Trends
ISSN:2045-2322, 2045-2322
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We explore the discourse on climate change across multiple social media platforms, examining the evolution of user engagement with climate-related content and whether this content links to reliable or unreliable news media sources. Through a detailed examination of over 20 million posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube over five years (2018–2022), we identify trends in engagement, distinguishing between unreliable and reliable content to assess the impact of misinformation. Further, we investigate the relationships among various discussion topics and their association with information quality, employing a network-based method to quantify the semantic distances between these categories. Our findings reveal diverse trends in engagement that align with global events, suggesting that social media discussions promptly reflect the resonance of real life events concerning climate change such as COP26, the Climate Action Week and climate strikes associated with the Fridays for Future movement. Notably, despite the lower volume of content linking to unreliable sources, we observe significantly greater relative engagement with these sources compared to content from reliable sources on all platforms except Twitter. This highlights a persistent challenge in the online discourse surrounding climate misinformation.
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ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-025-03082-9