"Climate dictatorship", "Climate pass", "Great Reset": Unraveling the impact of climate conspiracy theories on public opinion

Opsci and Cluster 17 have studied for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès the breakthrough of online radicalism narratives to understand the evolution of public debate on the climate crisis in 2023, particularly the rise of anti-ecological and climate conspiracy arguments, and assess their prevalence and potential for diffusion among the French population.

Challenges

• Measuring the impact of radical distrust narratives disseminated by anti-vaccine communities against ecology on French public opinion
• Evaluating the importance of social networks as new mass media and their role in diversifying climate-related topics and concerns

Solutions

• Implementation of the Climate Conversation Observatory on French Twitter
• Development and implementation of deep learning topic mining methodologies for massive content analysis
• Identification of trends and weak signals in the Climate Conversation
• Understanding and analysis of communities engaged or positioning themselves on the climate issue
• Development of a comprehensive methodology for opinion trajectory analysis, combining online trace monitoring and representative surveys.

Results

• Identification of the reappropriation of the climate issue by the entire political world and the rise of anti-ecological counter-discourses
• Highlighting the growing power of conspiracy theories regarding climate, particularly among anti-vaccine communities
• Conducting a clustered survey, the results of which confirm the potential for diffusion of climate conspiracy theories observed online: three out of ten French people adhere to a climate conspiracy statement on climate dictatorship, and eight out of ten believe that the poorest pay for the climate and energy crisis while the richest are responsible..