Arctic disinformation on X (Twitter) – an empirical investigation

ABSTRACT

Disinformation campaigns have been deployed on social media by foreign states to target democratic elections as well as sow distrust in traditional authority figures. Scarce attention has been devoted to study the intensity and nature of online disinformation in relation to Arctic issues. This article presents evidence from an empirical study that gathered 1.7 million messages posted on the social media X (Twitter) that addressed Arctic issues. In total, we manually coded 12 500 to detect if and how disinformation was present. We found that Arctic disinformation is first and foremost climate disinformation: climate deniers or minimizers are the main drivers of disinformation on the region. These accounts have used common strategies including cherry-picking data, providing anecdotal evidence and attacking scientists to push their arguments forward. Finally, we observed an increase in Arctic disinformation since Elon Musk expressed his intention to acquire the platform.

KEYWORDS:

• Disinformation
• anthropogenic global warming
• Twitter
• Arctic conversation
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data collection was interrupted in May 2023. X (Twitter) revoked academic access to their API, cutting researchers from an affordable access to their data. Academic options were not restored at the time of writing.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received funding from the Department of National Defence of Canada through its MINDS program to pursue this research project.