Conspiracy theories have moved from Covid-19 to the climate. What impact could they have on the European elections?

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On 9 February 2024, Dutch MEP Rob Roos told an audience in Poland that the EU Green Deal was “destroying our food system”. Closing the speech, he warned that “we are moving towards what I call a new type of communism”.

Roos is a radical politician who is currently an independent in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group of the European Parliament, alongside far-right parties such as the Brothers of Italy and Vox of Spain.

When he made these comments, for which there is no evidence, Roos was speaking at a relatively small event in Warsaw. Published on YouTube, a nearly two-hour video of the event had just 1,900 views.

But on social media, a shorter excerpt of Roos’ comments was shared much more widely by conspiracist influencers, many of whom have recently turned their attention to the EU’s climate policies.

On Telegram, a channel called DiscloseTV published Roos’ clip with a quote that climate change “is a manufactured crisis”. Several other channels shared DiscloseTV’s video, which quickly gained more than a quarter of a million views.

This was one of countless examples of how conspiracist narratives about climate change are proliferating on social media before EU parliamentary elections in June.

Many of the groups behind these narratives have previously advanced conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and are shifting to climate issues as radical right parties increasingly focus on environmental policy. Over the course of a five-month investigation, we worked with experts from research agency Prose Intelligence to understand the evolution of climate denialism.

What are the main lines of climate misinformation?

Viral narratives claim that environmental regulations make famine “inevitable” or that, under the guise of preventing pandemics, the EU is seeking new powers to restrict flights and limit civil rights in the name of fighting climate change.

A Telegram message with this claim was seen by 250,000 people, before spreading to other platforms.

“Conspiracy and far-right groups that exploited Covid denialism and anti-vaccine misinformation to gain relevance during the pandemic quickly turned to other issues to try to stay relevant,” says Callum Hood, director of research at the Center For Countering Digital Hate.

“One such issue is climate and the farmers’ protests in particular, which they have presented as a populist revolt against an imagined sinister elite.”

Will climate disinformation have an impact on the EU elections?

Experts say disinformation about climate change is now at risk of entering the mainstream in several European countries and will play a key role in the upcoming elections.

Sean Buchan, climate disinformation researcher at Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), says conspiracist influencers, above all, “chase influence” and are shifting to posts about climate and farmer protests as that covid-19 becomes less interesting for your audience.

“With increased activity on climate policy, it’s an opportunity to exploit people’s legitimate fears and concerns and profit from it,” says Buchan.

“It will definitely affect the outcome of the European elections, because it has affected elections before. We have already seen in Germany how the attacks that exaggerated the Greens’ heat pump deployment problems affected the party’s popularity.”

Climate misinformation has emerged in recent months

From the end of November 2023, Euronews Green monitored climate discourse on Telegram, which has become a hub for conspiracist groups during the Covid-19 pandemic. We follow 3,899 conspiracy channels and groups in more than 20 European languages. Collectively, messages from these chats were viewed at least 100 million times per month.

Production related to climate change evolved substantially during the period we monitored. It was not a prominent part of the conversation in the fall of 2023, with disinformation “influencers” primarily focusing on the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as continuing to post about the pandemic.

But in the months that followed, narratives around climate change increased significantly compared to Covid-19. During and after COP28, which took place between November 30th and December 15th, narratives increased from an average of 250 posts to a maximum of 1,000 posts per day.

During this period, climate discourse saw a 400% increase at its peak and has since remained higher than before. In the five months since the end of November, the data also shows that daily climate discourse on conspiracist channels has doubled and continues to be prominent at the time of writing.

The monitored channels and groups also took advantage of the farmers’ protests that broke out in January. There were huge spikes in activity that far outstripped content related to Covid-19, as channel owners sought to exploit the protests and reduce farmers’ multifaceted complaints to attacks on EU climate policies.

These messages peaked four times higher than Covid-related messages. This led to January being the month with the highest number of total views of posts on monitored channels and groups, reaching 250 million views compared to 131 million views in March. Spikes in posts about the farmers’ protests also correlated with spikes in posts mentioning the EU and the World Economic Forum, both popular targets of conspiracy theorists.

Far from being limited to conspiratorial groups, denialism and disinformation about the climate are increasingly reaching the general debate, according to Leonie Pflaller, an analyst at the North American company NewsGuard, which classifies news sites.

One example is the persistent claims that cold weather phenomena disprove climate change. “The hashtags climatescam or KlimaSchwindel (in German) continue to be popular on X,” Pfaller tells Euronews Green. “We see these trends especially around climate ‘extremes’ such as colder temperatures in Central Europe [em meados de abril].”

What role does Telegram play in climate discourse?

Although companies like Twitter/X and Facebook receive more media coverage for false and misleading information platforms, Telegram has become a key node in the distribution of conspiratorial views.

In many European countries, Covid-19 skeptics have flocked to the largely unmoderated platform during the pandemic and asked audiences to follow them, sometimes after being banned from other platforms for violating those companies’ policies.

In our analysis, German-language content ranked notably high compared to other languages. More than 33% of the weather posts in our dataset were in German, compared to almost 36% in English, 8% in Spanish, and 7.5% in French.

According to its own estimates, Telegram has surpassed 900 million users worldwide, which places it among the largest social networks on the planet. But the company managed to avoid tighter control in Europe.

In February, Telegram registered a monthly average of 41 million users in the EU, slightly below the threshold set by the EU for large platforms, which allowed it to avoid direct supervision by the Commission and the stricter obligations under the moderation law. of contents.

Eliška Pírková, an analyst at the digital rights group Access Now, says there is a lack of transparency in the number of monthly active users of some platforms, including Telegram. The European Commission has not published any concrete methodology on how to count monthly active users, she adds, leaving the issue in the hands of companies.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told Euronews Green that it will continue to monitor developments to assess whether other platforms should be included in its list of large platforms requiring direct supervision.

Climate misinformation will have ‘chilling effect’ post-elections

Meanwhile, experts say misinformation about climate change is no longer shared only by hard-line skeptics, but has been “co-opted into the culture wars” and mixed in with a variety of anti-establishment grievances, from migration to reproductive rights.

“Climate change denialism is often mixed with far-reaching conspiracy theories claiming that the media, experts and governments are collaborating in this process,” says Pfaller.

Joe Düker, a researcher at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy – a Germany-based non-profit organization that monitors conspiracy ideologies, disinformation, anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism, especially on Telegram – argues that conspiracy ideologies fuel a conspiracist “world view”. This means that someone who believes in conspiracies about Covid-19 would be open to false or misleading narratives about the climate and vice versa.

“Because influencers of conspiracy and far-right ideologies want to appeal to a wide audience and wish to exploit emotions such as fear or anger, they tend to focus on topics that are currently widely – and hotly – debated in society “, says Düker. This includes the weather.

The way climate issues are discussed by conspiracist influencers has also evolved over time, according to Düker. “While climate deniers used to outright deny that climate change was happening or was not caused by human-generated greenhouse gases, today many climate deniers paint climate science as unreliable or argue that solutions proposals for climate change don’t work”, he says.

Düker adds that climate change can be expected to continue to be a “hot topic” for conspiracist influencers as its impact on the world intensifies.

The impact of climate disinformation will extend beyond the European elections, says CAAD’s Sean Buchan.

“After the election, the chilling effect on climate policy should not be underestimated,” Buchan predicts. “Elected officials will feel they do not have the political capital necessary to implement climate action and the necessary transition will be slower, negatively affecting millions of lives.”

Telegram was contacted for comment.