Study: Twitter Bots Amplified Climate Denial Messages to Help Trump

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. 

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.

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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.”

As the Guardian summarized:

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics—bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action,” the analysis states.

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.”

Pro-Trump, anti-environment bots are dominating a significant part of the climate discussion on Twitter. (A better approach to anonymity would help change this.)
https://t.co/Wugn7rZpZ9 pic.twitter.com/Yewlk7cUB5

— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) February 21, 2020

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.

In response to the Guardian report, some climate action advocacy groups reassured followers that their tweets are written by humans:

This tweet has been written by a human, but a QUARTER of all tweets about the #ClimateCrisis are produced by bots, according to a new study.

The result? A distortion of the online conversation to "include far more climate science denialism…"https://t.co/ZvRBVceuZa

— Friends of the Earth