Welcome to the guest lecture in HumAI’s seminar series: Speaking for the Smoke: Using AI to study the Amplification of Climate Misinformation. This time, we welcome Anton Törnberg, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg.
A recent policy report underscores a critical shift: climate misinformation is no longer confined to the digital fringes but increasingly originates from within the political mainstream. Political elites – especially in fossil-fuel aligned, populist, or authoritarian regimes – play a central role in amplifying and legitimizing misleading climate narratives. This presentation explores how AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to study how such elites contribute to the global circulation of climate misinformation. Drawing on a global dataset of approximately 26 million tweets posted over five years by politicians from all major parties in 26 countries, the presentation explores which types of political actors spread climate misinformation; how this varies across regime types, regions, and ideological orientations; and what kinds of narratives elites deploy to delay climate action. Combining LLMs with qualitative human coding, the presentation uses a comparative framework mapping patterns of elite misinformation across democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian contexts, and traces temporal surges around key political and environmental events such as COP meetings, spikes of climate movement mobilization, and extreme weather crises.
Anton Törnberg is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses primarily on the online far right, combining computational methods with qualitative approaches. He is the author of Intimate Communities of Hate: Why Social Media Fuels Far-Right Extremism (Routledge, 2024).