Storani Saverio, Falkenberg Max, Quattrociocchi Walter, Cinelli Matteo
Department of Computer Science, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Regina Elena 295, Rome, 00161, Italy.
Department of Mathematics, City University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 28;15(1):18629. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-03082-9.
We explore the discourse on climate change across multiple social media platforms, examining the evolution of user engagement with climate-related content and whether this content links to reliable or unreliable news media sources. Through a detailed examination of over 20 million posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube over five years (2018-2022), we identify trends in engagement, distinguishing between unreliable and reliable content to assess the impact of misinformation. Further, we investigate the relationships among various discussion topics and their association with information quality, employing a network-based method to quantify the semantic distances between these categories. Our findings reveal diverse trends in engagement that align with global events, suggesting that social media discussions promptly reflect the resonance of real life events concerning climate change such as COP26, the Climate Action Week and climate strikes associated with the Fridays for Future movement. Notably, despite the lower volume of content linking to unreliable sources, we observe significantly greater relative engagement with these sources compared to content from reliable sources on all platforms except Twitter. This highlights a persistent challenge in the online discourse surrounding climate misinformation.
我们在多个社交媒体平台上探讨了关于气候变化的话语，研究了用户对气候相关内容的参与度演变，以及这些内容是否链接到可靠或不可靠的新闻媒体来源。通过对2018年至2022年五年间在脸书、照片墙、推特和优兔上超过2000万条帖子的详细审查，我们确定了参与度的趋势，区分了不可靠和可靠的内容，以评估错误信息的影响。此外，我们采用基于网络的方法来量化这些类别之间的语义距离，研究各种讨论话题之间的关系及其与信息质量的关联。我们的研究结果揭示了与全球事件相符的多样化参与趋势，表明社交媒体讨论迅速反映了与气候变化相关的现实生活事件的共鸣，如第26届联合国气候变化大会、气候行动周以及与“未来星期五”运动相关的气候罢工。值得注意的是，尽管链接到不可靠来源的内容数量较少，但我们观察到，在除推特之外的所有平台上，与这些来源的相对参与度相比来自可靠来源的内容显著更高。这凸显了围绕气候错误信息的在线话语中持续存在的挑战。
