At this point, with so much scientific evidence and so many experts warning about the problem, how is it possible that there are such a high number of people that they still deny the reality of climate change? And, above all, why are there so many ‘denial’ users on social networks like Twitter ?
The first question cannot be answered, but for the second question it is possible to use as a reply a study carried out by researchers at Brown University (Rhode Island, United States). They have discovered that a quarter of the publications on climate change that have been posted on the microblogging platform would not have been written by real users, but by bots.
The authors of the study have been able to verify how the bots would have created the impression that there was a high level of denial of climate change .
To carry out their research, the team analyzed 6.5 million tweets in June 2017 , that is, the period that would coincide with Donald Trump’s announcement to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. This agreement was negotiated during the XXI Conference on Climate Change (COP 21) and was signed in April 2016 in New York. The rest of the countries maintained their support for the agreement , despite the American abandonment.
The researchers used an Indiana University tool called Botometer to learn about the nature and origin of the bird’s social network updates. They also created several subcategories to identify what was being talked about. Thus they discovered that 25% of all those posts on Twitter, which mostly focused on the denial of global warming or the rejection of climate science, would not have been written by a ‘human hand’.
“The findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denial messages about climate change, ” they underline in The Guardian, which has advanced the study.
What the architects of the work have failed to find out to date has been who was behind these climate change denial bots.
The more tweets, the more influence
The use of bots on a social network such as Twitter can have quite a significant impact. As there are more updates with a hashtag or talking about a particular topic, the platform detects it and includes it among its trends, which generates a call effect . Furthermore, the general feeling is that there is some support for an idea or movement, which in turn can influence public opinion.
During the days surrounding Trump’s announcement to withdraw from the Paris accords, there was a general increase in tweets talking about climate change . The number of posts published by bots would have risen from hundreds each day to more than 25,000 per day . Since there were more humans tweeting on the subject during these dates, the representation of posts made by machines dropped to 13%.
Although bots can write automatically and be programmed, behind them there is always a human hand that configures them. Who would have been responsible in this case? What were your intentions?
