Climate Change Conspiracy Theories on Social Media
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03318v1
- Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2021 15:56:44 GMT
- Title: Climate Change Conspiracy Theories on Social Media
- Authors: Aman Tyagi, Kathleen M. Carley
- Abstract summary: This paper discusses some of the major conspiracy theories related to climate change found in a large Twitter corpus.
We use a state-of-the-art stance detection method to find whether conspiracy theories are more popular among Disbelievers or Believers of climate change.
- Score: 7.629857853338894
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: One of the critical emerging challenges in climate change communication is
the prevalence of conspiracy theories. This paper discusses some of the major
conspiracy theories related to climate change found in a large Twitter corpus.
We use a state-of-the-art stance detection method to find whether conspiracy
theories are more popular among Disbelievers or Believers of climate change. We
then analyze which conspiracy theory is more popular than the others and how
popularity changes with climate change belief. We find that Disbelievers of
climate change are overwhelmingly responsible for sharing messages with
conspiracy theory-related keywords, and not all conspiracy theories are equally
shared. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for climate change
communication.
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