The wind whips embers as the Palisades fire burns during a windstorm on the west side of Los Angeles, January 8. REUTERS/Ringo Chiu
Destruction and devastation, piles of cars and ashen landscapes, mud and dust, sometimes a rescue worker holding a child or a pet. These images of natural disasters are inescapable on our social media feeds. We see a deluge every time something happens: a hurricane, a flood or wildfires, many of which are driven or exacerbated by climate change.
These same events are extensively covered by news outlets in traditional formats like newspapers and TV reports. However, the increasing use of social media for news, coupled with the rise of news influencers, means many people (and especially younger audiences) are likely to come across these images while scrolling their favourite apps. Some might be posted by the official accounts of reputable news sources, but many come from regular users or anonymous accounts.
How can audiences sort valuable insights from citizen journalists on the ground from misleading images and narratives? I spoke to three journalists active in the climate reporting and fact-checking space in Brazil, Nigeria and the UK to find out.
Perhaps the most obvious danger of following climate disasters on social media is encountering falsehoods.
Our recent report on climate change news audiences in eight countries found that 78% say they are at least somewhat concerned about misleading news about climate change, with 25% saying they have come across this kind of information in the last week. They were also more likely to think they encountered this misinformation online than from other sources.
It only takes a brief online search to find misinformation and conspiracy theories about recent natural disasters. Online rumours are often so widespread that government agencies themselves publish corrections.
Last autumn, as strong hurricanes threatened communities in the US, the country’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration posted a fact-check denying online claims amplified by a Republican Congresswoman that the government was creating hurricanes and choosing their path. The state of North Carolina even dedicated a webpage to explaining its response to Hurricane Helene.
“During emergencies such as the recent extreme floods that Nigeria experienced in its capital Abuja in September, conversations are always tweaked with disinformation,” said Lanre Olagunju, a Nigerian open-source investigation expert and the editor-in-chief of climate-focused media consultancy CheckClimate Africa. One example of this is a pervasive narrative that Lagos is below sea level (it’s not).
As the Brazilian state Rio Grande do Sul suffered the country’s worst flooding in over 80 years in the spring of 2024, science and environment journalist Meghie Rodrigues believed the situation was too dire for disinformation.
“I thought, people are dying, people are losing their homes, so they are going to be a little thoughtful,” she said. Instead, she started seeing partisan disinformation claiming the federal government led by left-wing President Lula da Silva wasn’t helping the state. This messaging appeared to be led by far-right voices. “If you are in despair, if you lost your house and then you get a WhatsApp message saying that, you're going to believe it because you are so fragile,” she added.
Politicians, parties and governments are perceived by news audiences to be driving forces in spreading climate misinformation, our recent report found.
The journalists I spoke to suggested that the proliferation of climate-related misinformation narratives during natural disasters is picking up pace.
“I've been doing this job since 2021 and I have noticed that it is becoming more frequent during extreme weather events,” said BBC News’ climate disinformation specialist Marco Silva.
Silva has encountered online misinformation during the wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, Hurricanes Milton and Helene, the floods in Dubai and Valencia, and the heatwaves in southern Europe.
This year's destructive fires in Los Angeles were also fodder for false narratives. “Every time these extreme weather events become so big, they are making a huge amount of headlines. So the conversation around them is growing and misinformation enters that conversation,” Silva said.
For some climate journalists involved in fact-checking work or tuned into climate discourse on social media, it can be tough to identify the scale of the problem. Viewing and engaging with climate misinformation on algorithm-driven platforms such as TikTok will drive more similar content to your feed, giving the journalist in question a potentially distorted view of what the average user encounters.
“While my perspective is that of someone who's totally immersed, experience has also shown me that climate misinformation and disinformation seem to be spread by accounts that are incredibly loud,” Silva said.
People who deny the reality of climate change are a minority. But on social media, these voices are very loud, active and passionate in pushing their agenda. “You might get the distorted perspective that those voices are monopolising the debate,” Silva explained.
It’s also not just plain climate change denialism: some of the misinformation takes root in conspiracy theories, concerning topics like geoengineering and weather manipulation, and some is just misguided speculation about the causes of the extreme events.
Silva offers an example that often crops up in cases of disastrous wildfires: that the ‘real’ cause is arson, not climate change.
“By focusing on arson alone and ignoring the rest of the picture, you don't understand how those wildfires become such huge events in themselves, and how they spread so quickly to reach such vast areas,” Silva said. Whatever form these narratives take, however, “there is definitely a deluge of misinformation every time.”
Rodrigues has noticed the online conversation in Brazil also moving away from claims that climate change isn’t real to more subtle arguments about the actions to be taken about it.
She gave the example of conversations about climate policies’ impact on energy supply and the economy. This can take the form of so-called ‘climate delayism’, a pattern of arguments that diminish the dangers of climate change and over-emphasise the downsides of tackling it, often calling for a delay in any significant action.
A 2023 analysis from the anti-disinformation advocacy organisation Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that 70% of climate denialist claims on YouTube now fall under climate delayism. “We are living in a moment in which people want easy answers to complicated problems,” Rodrigues said. “So it's very easy to be caught in this kind of discourse because you just don’t want to think much about the world’s problems. You just want your problems to be solved.”
These problems extend well beyond social media. As observers have often pointed out, misinformation long predates social platforms, and is often spread by people in positions of power. Sometimes, false narratives about extreme climate events can take the opposite direction, attributing to climate change or natural causes damage caused by mistakes made by authorities or companies.
Nigerian government officials blamed climate change for the collapse of a badly damaged dam in September, even after repeated warnings it was at high risk, according to ground-breaking reporting from New York Times’ reporters Ruth Maclean and Ismail Alfa.
Another example is what happened at the Lagdo Reservoir in Cameroon, near the border with Nigeria, Olagunju added. The release of excess water from this reservoir’s dam in Cameroon has contributed to flooding in Nigeria. Originally, the intention was for a second dam to be built in Nigeria to contain overflow, but this never happened.
When flooding occurs, Olagunju said, “the Nigerian government is quick to say, ‘This is climate change.’ And indeed, climate change causes higher precipitation. But there's a lot of infrastructural deficit.”
False or misleading narratives about climate change, whether online or not, can be a problem for journalists reporting on the issues. Olagunju posted a fact-check article about the inaccurate claim that Nigeria’s most populous city is below sea level after a professor at the University of Lagos made this claim in a televised Sunday talk show in which he appears regularly.
“That particular narrative has been around for long enough, and even those who are supposed to be learned share it,” Olagunju said, pointing out this was also amplified by being broadcast by a popular media outlet. “Sometimes, as a journalist, it takes you doing a second check. Have you checked if they are experts on this particular topic? Do they have the authority to speak to this particular matter?” he said.
Social media can be a valuable source for journalists reporting on an evolving emergency. Developing news stories are now often interspersed with images from social media, especially before photojournalists can be on the ground and in situations when reaching an affected area is difficult.
“There are a lot of benefits related to citizen journalism,” Olagunju said. “We cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bathwater just because those doing the reporting are not experts.” But he adds that it’s up to journalists and media professionals to use their training and expertise to filter through social posts and verify information.
“If someone who was at the point of an earthquake was able to catch it in video clips and post it real-time on social media, then you, as a fact-checker, can capture that video and analyse it,” Olagunju said. “This citizen, who is not a certified journalist, has provided the data. But we have a responsibility to check [if it’s true].”
Silva, who carries out investigations for BBC Verify as part of his job, echoed this point. “We all have someone in our families who has at some point sent us a dodgy video, image or Facebook post that they simply didn’t verify, and sometimes it doesn’t relate to the event that we're talking about. So part of our job involves telling them, look, this content is real. We’ve verified it,” he said.
Even as truthful posts can be helpful, platforms rewarding ‘viral’ content can lead to some creators putting themselves in dangerous situations without proper training or coordination with emergency services, which professional journalists covering the same events usually have access to.
For example, some creators may choose not to evacuate affected locations to film throughout the experience, or even perform dangerous stunts for views, as some did during Hurricane Milton. Obtaining the best shots of what’s going on in a disaster zone can also prevent emergency workers from doing their jobs.
During the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, flying drones in affected areas was prohibited, as it always is in the US during firefighting efforts. This hasn’t stopped everyone, though, with one civilian drone damaging a water tanker.
Journalistic work about climate change is popular on social media. BBC News posts regular updates on breaking news and Verify material on its accounts including TikTok, X and Instagram. Olagunju promotes his fact-checks widely on social platforms.
Even when official news accounts and fact-checks are not effective at changing everyone’s mind, journalists should avoid leaving social media to be the domain of unchecked information, Rodrigues thinks. However, the decision to join or stay on a particular platform should be balanced with considerations about the possibility of engaging in open debate and concerns about journalists’ mental health.
Rodrigues recently decided to leave X. On that platform, “fighting the algorithm is an inglorious battle, I'd say even a Quixotic one,” she said. After recent statements made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding moving away from fact-checking on his platforms, she said she will wait and see how any changes affect debate on Instagram and Facebook.
Not having a personal presence on social platforms doesn’t mean ignoring what’s going on there, Rodrigues added. The journalists and researchers tracking social media trends, including misinformation, are doing valuable work. “As long as [X] still has a relevant volume of human users, it might be best not to turn your back to it completely in the sense of ignoring what circulates there – talk to the people in hazmat suits who stayed there and know the place,” she quipped.
For Olagunju, on the other hand, X remains a key focus as the most relevant platform for his fact-checking work, followed by Facebook and YouTube.
It’s hard to balance the effects of social media on climate information. The picture is complicated and ever-evolving. As Silva said, “The fact that you have this avalanche of content means that, in addition to having a lot of content that enhances people’s understanding of the world, there is also a lot of content that does the exact opposite. We can hear from people in remote parts of the globe that perhaps we would have struggled to hear from. But the number of threats that are created by this information ecosystem have multiplied.”
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