Upcoming
Behind the scenes of digital climate disinformation: methods for detecting communities and tracing information flows
Date & Time
04/06/2025 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Simon Lindgren
Umeå University
I am Professor of Sociology and director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary academic research centre for the study of social dimensions of digital technology.
My research is about politics, power, and resistance at the intersection of society and digital technologies. I use critical discourse approaches, computational text analysis, and social network analysis to study issues relating to movements, mobilization, opinions, and identities.
About the Event
This talk will present findings from our analysis of how climate disinformation spreads across different communities on Twitter (now, of course, X) during major climate events. Using a dataset of over 12 million tweets from the COP26 and COP27 climate conferences, I will demonstrate how we combined machine learning classification, social network analysis, and qualitative methods to identify the key brokers, amplifiers, and pathways through which climate disinformation circulates. For the methods-focused portion of the seminar, I will provide a behind-the-scenes look at our approach to automated disinformation detection, the challenges of applying community detection algorithms to large-scale social media data, and the essential role of qualitative validation.
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