Jordan Peterson, the psychology professor who refused to honor students' pronouns turned fracking-funded Daily Wire contractor, is one of the many voices turning Twitter into a toxic cesspool of rightwing disinformation and hate, according to The Guardian. On Monday, Peterson even quoted the Guardian story and shared links to multiple professional climate deniers, as if to reiterate his dedication to disinformation.
Peterson's turn to climate denial is indicative of a larger shift that has been identified in white papers before, and is now confirmed by a new peer-reviewed study on the increasing polarization around climate change on social media
A team of UK and Italian researchers studied the conversation around the United Nations Conference Of Parties negotiations on climate change from 2014 to 2021 and found "a large increase in ideological polarization during COP26, following low polarization between COP20 and COP25."
What changed? The authors wrote that "this increase is driven by growing right-wing activity." Since the Paris Agreement was signed at the COP21 in 2015, there has been “a fourfold increase” in right-wing Twitter engagement relative to pro-climate groups.
This right-wing activity has led climate disinformation and "accusations of hypocrisy" against the climate concerned to "become key themes in the Twitter climate discussion since 2019." And all that was before Elon Musk welcomed violent rightwing conspiracy theorists and neo-nazis back on Twitter.
The researchers found that COP21's Twitter conversation was dominated by accounts like @UN and @LeoDiCaprio, with only a few climate deniers like Bjorn Lomborg, Tony Heller, and Steve Milloy in the top 300 list. For COP26, though, there were 56 oppositional accounts, of which six were climate-focused. The most popular accounts were actually non-climate-specific disinformation sources, like GB News and Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet).
The study also found that, based on how climate-specific accounts were retweeted compared to the generalists, "the promotion of climate-contrarian views is shifting away from climate-focused accounts towards a broader set of non-specialized influencers."
Jordan Peterson may be anti-science, but even still, he can't help but prove some science right!