As the new year looms ahead and all the year-in-review and what’s-to-come thinkpieces start rolling out, we too are feeling reflective.
How has the climate disinformation landscape shifted? Who’s tapped out, and who’s emerging? And why are UFOs and Uzbekistan part of the climate disinfo conversation?
Just look at this picture that Bjorn Lomborg posted to X/Twitter. “Great to meet Deputy Minister of Health Elmira Basitkhanova,” the text caption reads. “Her ministry is responsible for many of [the] best value for money policies for Uzbekistan.” Two days earlier, Lomborg also posted similar pictures of himself smiling next to Uzbekistan’s deputy minister of digital technologies and the director of the Agency for Innovative Development.
Lomborg’s long sought to ply his trade to whomever will listen, so meeting with government officials from Uzbekistan to tell them how they should do their jobs is not exactly a new breakthrough for him.
But Lomborg’s bland self-promotion is a great example of the larger changes in the climate disinformation landscape on Twitter/X. While the platform was once a digital space where you could observe disinfluencers acting relatively unconstrained, arguing with critics and joking with their friends but not otherwise worrying about being caught behaving badly, that has clearly changed. One after another, disinfluencers’ feeds are giving way to stale and sterile self-promotion posts urging followers to buy their book or Substack subscription or t-shirts.
But that’s not to say that everything’s boring. While the climate-specific disinfluencers have gotten increasingly boring and buttoned-up, the general-purpose click-chasers who occasionally talk about climate change are only getting more unhinged, if such a thing is possible. So what’s not boring, is just so incredibly, painfully stupid.
That’s where the UFOs come in. Michael Shellenberger‘s already abandoned his UFO conspiracy theory, but ousted Fox personality Tucker Carlson has picked up the thread for his “show” on X and the Tucker Carlson Network, his new propaganda effort.
So on the one hand, we can look forward to more professionalized disinfo in the form of staid press release-type content from lobbyists like Lomborg and Alex Epstein, and on the other, we can expect even more deranged content about extraterrestrials from the Twitter trolls.
2024 should be a fun year!
Source: Daily Kos
