How Climate Disinformation Spreads: Native Advertising

Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative

Research Theme | How native advertising is employed for corporate communications campaigns

Research goal: To extend related research to focus on the discussion of climate issues in native advertising, especially to identify how corporations engaged in native advertising are using the medium to affect public attitudes toward climate

On the issue of climate change, the evidence is clear that mainstream politicians1 and large corporations2 have been major spreaders of disinformation. To further understand how climate lies spread, the Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative focuses on native advertising3 to complement its emphases on social media.

Native advertising is a format of advertising that mimics that of news articles; native ads typically run under the logo of the news organization and often share stylistic elements such as font, as well as writing style, with news articles. Native ads are a growing part of the advertising business, and in fact many news organizations today have internal “content studios” that create native advertising for corporate clients and special interest groups.

Research by a member of the team has made clear that most readers do not recognize the difference between paid posts and genuine journalistic articles4, raising concerns about the potential for deception of readers who are not exactly aware of the origins of the content they are reading. (In fact, a native advertisement from ExxonMobil that ran in The New York Times is an exhibit in a lawsuit against the fossil fuel company brought by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office for deceptive advertising claims about climate change).

Specifically, in this theme, the research team aims to identify native advertising that makes statements or claims about the environment, climate change, or energy; identify which companies and other entities are engaging in that advertising; analyze the nature of their claims; and detect disinformation or misleading claims.

After developing methods to gather native advertising at scale using web scrapers written in python, the research team has gathered about 2,500 native advertisements in 19 of the world’s largest English-language news media, such as The New York Times, CNN, and BBC. These data are currently undergoing both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Research Theme Champions

References

  1. Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  2. Supran, G, & Oreskes, N. (2020). Addendum to ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014).’ Environmental Research Letters, 15(11), 1-18.
  3. Amazeen, M. A. (2022, February 4). New forms of advertising raise questions about journalism integrity. The Conversation.
  4. Amazeen, M. A. & Wojdynski, B. W. (2020). The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers. Journalism, 21(12), 1965-1984.