A Quarter of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots

[TheJoker]

According to a yet-to-be-published study from Brown University of the origin of 6.5 million tweets about climate and global warming, a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, disproportionately skeptical of climate science and action. The Brown University study wasn’t able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had on the climate debate.

“On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots,” reports The Guardian. “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.”