Years of research suggest that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty/Grist
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform—known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk—has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech—or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change.
More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multiyear analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from ExxonMobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry amid the transition to clean energy.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry—including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts—have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors—oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals—are “aligned and coordinated…to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.”
“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.
According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.
Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts—one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations—and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.
The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by ExxonMobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.
For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories—the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water—she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments—four that represent outright climate denial and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”
The “it isn’t happening” rhetoric denies the existence of climate change—or, more subtly, fossil fuels’ contribution to it. Kinol said she observed that companies usually didn’t claim outright that climate change isn’t happening, but rather implied that the use of hydrocarbons isn’t causing an increase in global temperatures. One tweet by Chevron alleges that natural gas benefits the environment.
In the “it isn’t that bad” approach, fossil fuel companies argue that climate change is not severe enough to merit a policy response. This particular tweet repeats the headline of a 2011 article in The Hill describing the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups’ request that US House members oppose provisions of a spending bill that would allow the EPA to set stricter greenhouse gas emissions standards for some polluting facilities.
The “it isn’t us” technique may acknowledge the reality of climate change and even fossil fuels’ contribution to it, but argues that fossil fuel companies should not be held responsible for the climate impacts of their products and that they may in fact be part of the solution. Kinol and her co-authors noted that the approach “is echoed across the sectors as the organizations provide cover to each other.” Here, the American Chemistry Council commends ExxonMobil for ostensibly helping to reduce emissions, without acknowledging the company’s continued role in causing climate change.
The “it’s taken care of” rhetoric, also referred to as “dismissal,” holds that climate change is not a crisis because human ingenuity is adequately addressing it—no further regulations are needed. The PLOS Climate paper describes the argument as “the smart people are on it.”
The four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of—arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.
According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial—like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said—“but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.
“It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative…reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)
The “redirection” technique deflects responsibility for climate change away from petrochemical companies and onto individuals, often by promoting consumer choices instead of government regulations or other levers for systemic change.
The “nontransformation” approach focuses on solutions that are unlikely to jeopardize continued petrochemical use, often relying on technologies that are unproven or that only address problems on a surface level. Stephens and Kinol said this type of rhetoric was particularly prevalent among the tweets they analyzed. For energy companies, this often meant the promotion of carbon capture technology that remains prohibitively expensive, and that has been used by fossil fuel companies to justify ongoing fossil fuel extraction and burning. For plastic companies, it was recycling, despite its well-documented failure to manage more than 10 percent of the world’s plastic waste. This tweet by the American Chemistry Council highlights recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis, instead of more systemic measures to reduce plastic production.
The “downside emphasis” tactic suggests that the drawbacks of climate and environmental regulations outweigh the benefits. For instance, this 2016 tweet from the Farm Bureau—a group that lobbies for agribusiness interests and whose state-level members have fought climate science and regulation—stresses the tradeoffs of renewable fuel standards, or RFS, which require that transportation fuels contain a minimum amount of fuel that’s deemed “renewable,” like fuel made out of plants.
Surrender: This rhetorical device “surrenders” to the idea that climate change mitigation is not feasible. It’s reflected here in the American Petroleum Institute’s claim that pollution limits are too burdensome to be implemented.
The study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced other research showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”
Six of the other organizations—the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, and FMC Corporation—did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.
Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics—delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories—have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads.
“You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.
Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove—though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.
Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data.
Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”
Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”
