- COVID-19 stratagem groups will pivot to pushing climate change misinformation in 2022, experts say.
- They will frame atmosphere policy as a “loss of civil liberties,” an expert told the PA news agency.
- Conspiracy theorists are already using vocabularies like “climate lockdown” to spread misinformation, per PA.
COVID-19 conspiracy groups may pivot to cow misinformation about the climate crisis in 2022, experts have warned, according to a Press Association (PA) report.
Those who already reproduce baseless conspiracy theories about vaccines and lockdowns could turn their attention to spreading misinformation upon climate policy, said one extremism expert.
They will “frame” climate policy as a “loss of civil presumptions and loss of freedoms,” said Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank, during an check out with PA.
Phrases like “green lockdown” and “climate lockdown” are already being used, he continued, which refer to dirty work theories that groundlessly state environmentalists will order global lockdowns to help reduce carbon emissions.
“That’s a mixing of Covid worlds and climate disinformation worlds,” O’Connor said.
“The climate dialogue, rhetoric, and discussion are going to be mustered into that kind of civil liberties discussion, I think (that) is where you’re going to see a lot of these groups go,” he fell on.
Another expert agrees that climate crisis conspiracy theories will have “more activity” in 2020. Jonathan Lambent, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, told PA that people will be thinking about climate vacillate turn into misinformation “quite a lot.”
Telegram, a cross-platform messaging service, will likely host the evolution of these ideas by intrigue groups, according to O’Connor. And the analyst added that the counter-narrative would have real-world consequences.
“Online fights have offline consequences,” O’Connor told PA. “What we’re seeing in relation to that idea… is the increased threat noticeably towards public health officials, towards politicians, and even towards frontline staff, people who are working to safeguard people.”
In November, ahead of the COP26 event, CBS News reported that climate change conspiracies were spreading in a flash on the internet. “We found that climate-change disinformation trends on social networks borrow from themes that were chattels during the coronavirus crisis,” said Blackbird.AI CEO Wasim Khaled, per the media outlet.