Truth Wars: The Bot Industry of Climate Denial

24 hours after the US election 400 of my X followers disappeared, and the list just keeps growing.  Fellow climate activists reported similar figures.  I guess all those bots aren’t needed now that Putin, Trump and Musk, with the help of Kamala and her BAU friends, have achieved their objective to put the climate crisis out of existence in peoples’ minds, even as climate disasters amplify.

I was asked during an interview about my last book why I believed that “the climate crisis would eventually become completely forgotten”.  They thought I was either joking or exaggerating.  I was doing neither, and events have proved me correct.  The climate crisis didn’t even feature in the US election’s campaigns, all the while as people died across the globe and in the US. 

Over the past few years, but especially in the past year and a half, all of my tweets were overwhelmed by bot replies aiming to drown the conversation with fabricated information.  I of course blocked them, but new ones emerged every day.  The amount of effort that these Twitter bots put into trying in vain to make me go crazy has been immense, and of course, somebody must have paid for them: probably Mr Musk et al. 

The replies to my tweets weren’t just nasty.  They were sophisticated and customized responses aiming to throw doubt over the existence of the climate crisis.  The sheer volume of these replies, the eloquent breadth of words used and specificity to the subject matter of my original tweet was astounding, given that they all came from bot accounts with cartoon characters or other fake photos as profile images. 

We may call these “bots”, but they are not dumb.  These are incredibly eloquent AI programs, which can be trained specifically on a particular subject matter of conversation, in this case the climate crisis, and given very specific instructions: “write something to contradict the existence of the climate crisis based on this particular tweet”, or, “write something to make the author feel attacked, based on any information you know about them personally from the web”.  Moreover, these tweets were often accompanied by falsified charted data of CO2, global temperature etc which could be easily a response to the instruction “make up a chart illustrating the decrease of global temperature over the past 300 years”. 

So without further ado, here are examples of some of my all-time favourites over the years:

“Yup, rain happens on Earth, so does flood.  Deal with it.”

“The climate crisis isn’t caused by humans.  It is caused by the sun”

“The Earth is greening because of the extra CO2”

“Degrowth yourself”

“Says someone using electricity, tweeting from their smartphone”

“Let’s start with you George.  Why don’t you off yourself”

“Says a faggot”

The fact that these sophisticated bots exist in the first place and receive such heavy sponsorship, means that the media is where the climate battle takes place. Musk and Putin may have won for now, but at least we got into their wallets just as they are getting into ours.  In my opinion, the climate movement must do the same.  We need the best hackers, the best AI programmers to help us blanket-bomb this asleep civilisation with the truth.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

Discover my Books Here

Note to my readers: I keep my site FREE because it’s not right to paywall existentially important content during an existential crisis.  But if you appreciate any of the work I’ve done over the years, please consider joining as a paid subscriber so it can continue!  I have minimal overheads, no sponsors to sell myself to, bosses who tell me what to write, or staff I have to pay.  It’s just me.  This freedom does mean though that your support is vital. Thank you so much!