Many readers miss the PAID POST disclaimer flagging this as an ad, not a New York Times article; BU researchers are studying the effects of such ads on climate change awareness. Photo via the New York Times

Business & Law

That “News Story” on Climate Change You’re Reading Might Be a Greenwashing Ad Instead

COM-led study seeks effective counters to disinformation about planetary warming

“How scientists are tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future” was the promised point of an article on the New York Times website. Except it wasn’t an article, but an ad—paid for by ExxonMobil and created by a Times-owned studio that handles the newspaper’s “native advertising,” aka sponsored content: advertising gussied up to look like news stories.

The ad became an exhibit in Massachusetts’ ongoing suit against ExxonMobil, alleging the corporate giant misleads consumers and investors about how its oil and gasoline products fuel not only cars but climate change as well. “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be,” says Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at the College of Communication. (ExxonMobil, which won a similar New York suit, but failed to get the Massachusetts case dismissed, says the Bay State is seeking to infringe the company’s free-speech rights in retaliation for its climate change positions.)

The TImes put “PAID POST” above the ad, but studies show that such disclaimers tip off few readers that they’re not looking at journalism, says Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations at COM. Research she conducted shows that when other industries paid for native ads on digital media outlets, those media pushed the pause button, for a time, on covering the advertisers.

The threat of climate change disinformation—not just from the usual suspects of social media and Fox News, but mainstream media as well—has prompted Wells, Amazeen, and five BU colleagues across COM, the College of Engineering, and Metropolitan College to probe the implications for the news industry and the planet. The COM-led effort, with Wells as lead investigator, began in July, with the researchers hoping to present results at a May symposium at BU’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences.

“Native advertising is appealing to publishers because it offers a lucrative form of revenue at a time when traditional display and classified advertising is disappearing,” says Amazeen, director of COM’s Communication Research Center. “The metaphorical wall that presumably separated journalists from the business side of news organizations has become increasingly porous, if not crumbled down altogether.”

Amazeen says the researchers hope to learn whether newshounds ease off their scrutiny of fossil fuel companies that buy native ads, as her research has shown in other industries. In addition, she says, they’re “interested in the substantive claims in the fossil fuel–sponsored native ads: are they accurate? Do the claims contradict the journalistic reporting from the news organization that created the native ads?”

The ultimate goal, she says, is to find effective correctives for consumers’ failure to recognize that these are ads—and for any climate change misperceptions derived from them.

As for methodology, Wells says, “we are looking at the top English-language news organizations by web traffic in the United States. We started with the top 50, and found that 26 have produced native advertising, so those 26 are our sample. These are big news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, CNN, and the HuffPost.”

“It is clear that [fossil fuel] companies are intent on promoting their green credentials…talking about their investments in ‘green’ technologies,” Wells says. “This is nothing new,” he adds, citing the 2021 Guardian story “The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing,” which surveyed back to the 1980s. The BU study, Wells says, will include a public survey to “test the dispersion of different kinds of narratives, including disinformation, about climate…and allow us to map where those narratives are most strongly held.”

In November, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British nonprofit, called out ExxonMobil and four other oil companies for “greenwashing”—ads trumpeting a firm’s environmentalism beyond factuality—on Google, “the biggest digital ad provider in the world.” 

Disinformation pollutes discourse beyond the climate change debate: we’re fresh off midterm elections that were awash in social media untruths. But disinformation about human-caused climate change “may be one that has been the most enduring and with far-reaching consequences,” says an earlier study by one of the BU project’s researchers, Arunima Krishna, an assistant professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations at COM.

“Despite overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that anthropogenic climate change is real,” she writes, “and if not addressed, will lead to severe consequences for the planet, recent reports have noted that the United States has the highest numbers of climate skeptics in the world.” 

Krishna laid out a four-tiered taxonomy of disinformation susceptibility, she tells BU Today, “based on [people’s] motivation about, extreme attitudes toward, and past acceptance of misinformation about a specific topic.” Bracketing the types at either end are disinformation-immune people, “those who have not accepted any misinformation about the topic and do not hold extreme attitudes about it,” making them the most likely to reject untruths, and disinformation-amplifying people, “those who have not only accepted misinformation about, and hold extreme attitudes about the topic, they are also extremely motivated about the topic.” 

She found two types in between these extremes. Disinformation-vulnerable types “are those who display either extreme attitudes or high knowledge deficiency, but not both, such that the susceptibility engendered by high levels of one may be offset by low levels of the other. [They’re] at moderate risk of accepting disinformation messages.” Disinformation-receptive people, “at high risk of accepting disinformation messages because of their past acceptance of topic-related misinformation,” hold either extreme attitudes about the topic or are highly motivated about it.

Amazeen is overseeing a related study by Emma Longo (COM’24) through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which funds faculty-mentored research by undergrads in multiple disciplines. “I am researching how fossil fuel companies partner with US news sites to produce media content that spreads misinformation on climate issues,” Longo says. 

Her project includes constructing a timeline of social and ecological events from 2014 to 2022 and analyzing native ads placed by fossil fuel companies. Her goal, she says, is “to learn more about the relationship between climate denialism and corporate greenwashing, especially how denialism circulates on digital platforms.”