Credibility of climate change denial in social media

Abhishek Samantray,Paolo Pin

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0344-4

Abstract

Public perception about the reality of climate change has remained polarized and propagation of fake information on social media can be a potential cause. Homophily in communication, the tendency of people to communicate with others having similar beliefs, is understood to lead to the formation of echo chambers which reinforce individual beliefs and fuel further increase in polarization. Quite surprisingly, in an empirical analysis of the effect of homophily in communication on the level of polarization using evidence from Twitter conversations on the climate change topic during 2007–2017, we find that evolution of homophily over time negatively affects the evolution of polarization in the long run. Among various information about climate change to which people are exposed to, they are more likely to be influenced by information that have higher credibility. Therefore, we study a model of polarization of beliefs in social networks that accounts for credibility of propagating information in addition to homophily in communication. We find that polarization can not increase with increase in homophily in communication unless information propagating fake beliefs has minimal credibility. We therefore infer from the empirical results that anti-climate change tweets are largely not credible.

Highlights

Public perception about the reality of climate change has remained polarized and propagation of fake information on social media can be a potential cause
vector error correction (VEC) models are a special class of models derived from vector autoregression (VAR) models with an additional term, called error correction term, to account for the cointegration
The online social network Twitter has remained an important media for rapid spread of opinions

Summary

Introduction

Public perception about the reality of climate change has remained polarized and propagation of fake information on social media can be a potential cause. With fake information on many topics becoming prevalent on widely adopted social media platform like Twitter, it is probably not surprising that there are several tweets both in favor and against the statement that climate change is a real concern. Fake information regarding such an important issue as climate change can pose a collective hurdle for the society at large if such information becomes highly credible among users of the platform. This is because retweets do not contain new opinions and are mere repetitions or broadcast of opinions expressed in original tweets, whereas mentions contain explicit referencing of other users and convey exchange of opinions targeted towards users being mentioned

Methods

Results

Conclusion