Translations:Course-v1:edz+11+2023 SP/en/block-v1:edz+11+2023 SP+type@html+block@df891e8b24a84393adcfaa1b81e6b7ba/content/en

Climate Disinformation

Efforts to manipulate public perceptions about climate change suffer the same problems of online polarization and disinformation common in other topics, such as elections and COVID. Like in these other areas, Wikipedia is a surprisingly resilient and important part of countering the disinformation: our verifiability policies, culture of fact checking, and deliberate avoidance of inflammatory political topics on the platform helps us avoid the worst of climate misinformation.

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<img height="100%" src="/static/desinformation_Mesa_de_trabajo_1_copia_2.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />

Climate disinformation <a href="https://caad.info/what-is-climate-disinformation/" target="_blank">has been defined by the digital journalism working group Climate Action Against Disinformation</a> as deceptive or misleading content that: Undermines the existence or impacts of climate change, the unequivocal human influence on climate change, and the need for corresponding urgent action according to the IPCC scientific consensus and in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement; Misrepresents scientific data, including by omission or cherry-picking, in order to erode trust in climate science, climate-focused institutions, experts, and solutions; or Falsely publicizes efforts as supportive of climate goals that in fact contribute to climate warming or contravene the scientific consensus on mitigation or adaptation.

Even though we don't find a lot of climate misinformation on Wikipedia, we still find a steady stream of misinformation in the Wikimedia wikis, especially around strategic omissions of knowledge. As Alex discussed in <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/climate-misinformation-how-do-we-tackle-it/audio-61480127" target="[object Object]">this podcast</a>, the community has been finding both misinformation such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-01-30/Op-Ed" target="_blank">misrepresentations of consensus science</a> and we have seen several attempts to politicize climate or environmental information by removing content that climate deniers find objectionable.

For example, in March 2021, a handful of the editors involved in English, Spanish and Portuguese language climate content found removal of information about the indigenous communities impacted by the deforestation caused by new roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Instead the editors were replacing the content with pro-economic development (and pro-deforestation) narratives promoted by the Bolsonaro presidency and directly contradicting reports by Brazilian government scientists.

<img width="100%" src="/static/image16.png" alt="road in BR-319 in Brazil " />

A picture of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BR-319" target="[object Object]">road in BR-319</a> in Brazil which is encouraging deforestation in the Amazon, and was targeted by pro-Bolsonaro editors manipulating Portuguese, English and Spanish Wikipedias in March 2021 and several times since.

This is not the only time climate-connected content has been manipulated. We have also seen editors targeted by misinformation actors for either a) representing criticism of climate denial, or b) documenting the work of climate activists. Wikipedia’s role as a fact checking site that can mitigate the spread of misinformation related to climate change. For example, as this course was launching in October 2022 a climate denier invited his <a href="https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1585418634129809409" target="[object Object]">followers to change his Wikipedia biography</a>.