Fighting Climate Misinformation: Fact-Checking of Climate Misinformation in Spanish-speaking podcasts.
- 1Institut Universitari de Recerca en Sostenibilitat, Canvi Climàtic i Transició Energètica (IU-RESCAT), Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Spain (jonxavier.olano@urv.cat)
- 2Centre for Climate Change (C3), Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
- 3Associació Verificat, Barcelona, Spain
- 4GRC Geociències Marines, Departament de Dinàmica de la Terra i de l’Oceà, Facultat de Ciències de la Terra, Universitat de Barcelona. c/ Martí i Franqués s/n, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Despite the evidences of the effects of climate change, and the need to adopt adaptation and mitigation measures against its effects, it still exists a significant current of denialism . Radio podcasts, an evolution of classical radio shows, are an interesting communication and leisure tool for disseminating climate misinformation in today's saturated communication world.
In the framework of the CLIMACAST: UNDERSTANDING AND EXPOSING CLIMATE MISINFORMATION ON PODCASTS project, we monitor, identify, verify and disseminate short notes to fight this climate misinformation. Currently, the project is in the middle of its execution; and we have monitored monitoring more than a thousand hours of podcasts in Spanish-speaking countries from July to December of 2022. The project, funded by META and Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network is a joint collaboration between C3/IU-RESCAT/URV, VERIFICAT and Kinzen and Chequeados.
The climate misinformation measure unit of this project is a climate claim. A claim is the smallest unit of analysis of verifiable information containing a disputed claim about climate, climate variability and climate change. In addition, to be considered a claim, the information or meaning included in the message should be verifiable content. To track problematic terms, the editors of Verificat monitor podcasts where people post climate disinformation to detect recurring words or phrases in this area to define keywords to find the podcasts. When the podcasts are selected, an artificial intelligence tool transcribes them to a specifically designed dashboard. If it detects problematic content - for example, the word 'calentólogo' (warmist) is typical of negationist slang - the system highlights the keyword for greater detection by analysts. The analyst checks if the keyword refers to some climate and/or meteorological aspect. Then, the analyst determines the content's verifiability based on the message's real climate disinformation. Each claim identified is classified in six main narratives: the main misinformation: climate change does not exist, climate change is not human-caused, climate change is not bad, solutions to face climate change do not work, climate science is not liable and greenwashing.
The results show how the claims are regularly identified in regular podcasts. However, it also shows slight growth in the two weeks of COP27.
How to cite: Olano Pozo, J. X., Cimolai, C., Arnal, A., Cisneros Bermejo, M., Boqué Ciurana, A., Dermit, D., Massip, M., Sigró, J., and Aguilar, E.: Fighting Climate Misinformation: Fact-Checking of Climate Misinformation in Spanish-speaking podcasts., EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-12639, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-12639, 2023.
