This has become the main activity of climatosceptics on the internet: delegitimizing the work of IPCC experts, whose summary of the sixth assessment report will be published on March 20. The opportunity to analyze the methods of denialists who aim to minimize or even deny the climate emergency.
The IPCC is “a political propaganda machine”its scientists are “crooks”. On the Internet, climate skeptics seek to demonstrate that this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is corrupt. But not only.
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This is demonstrated by the Climatoscope project, launched in 2015 by mathematician David Chavalarias, director of the Paris Institute of Complex Systems, and Maziyar Panahi, CNRS engineer specializing in artificial intelligence. This tool analyzes tweets from climate-skeptical accounts on Twitter.
A “more structured” community since last summer
According to their latest study published in mid-February, the number of climatosceptic accounts surged on Twitter in France in the summer of 2022. France has been facing a strong resurgence of climatoscepticism on Twitter since July 2022. “If we look at the climato-skeptical or climato-denialist activity at the level of France over the five years of observation, what we realize is that since this summer, there has been the formation of a much more structured community, which remains relatively small, but good which grows very quickly on denialist themesexplains David Chavalarias. And this community is inspired in particular by all the denialist movement that we find in the United States and in other Anglo-Saxon countries.
From the economic, political and geopolitical motivations of these networks to their strategies to increase their influence or carry their idea, David Chavalarias analyzes in this episode the different techniques used by these networks. Tristan Mendès-France and Rudy Reichstadt also return to the role of social networks and algorithms in the mechanisms of climate conspiracy on the internet.
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“From social networks to politics, the strategies of climate conspiracy”, this is the 44th episode of Complorama with Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, and Tristan Mendès France, lecturer and member of the observatory of conspiracy, specialist digital cultures. A podcast to be found on the franceinfo site, the Radio France application and several other platforms such as Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict, Spotify or Deezer.