Fact-Checking the Climate Change: Analyzing the Degrees of Fakeness in Environmental Disinformation

Disinformation is a relevant risk for our societies and fact-checkers play pivotal roles. Nevertheless, given the heterogeneity of fact-checkers' organizational and cultural backgrounds, the coherence of the debunking discourse should not be taken for granted. Their function of verifying the truth behind tendentially pernicious contents brings the issue of how their judgment is presented to the public. To demonstrate how fact-checkers' communication differs, here is presented an analysis of the different degrees to which fakeness is categorized by six Italian fact-checkers. The samples are the fake news regarding climate change, sustainable technologies, eco-activists, and similars, which circulated over one year (N=102). Since the overall goal of fact-checkers is to publicly provide a corrective message, based on the judgment of the truthfulness of a given content, it is hypothesized here that the way how truth is communicated can be indicative of heterogeneity the interpretations and representations of both its proclaimers and its public. Indeed, the presence of verdicts in a debunking article can indirectly prompt the heuristics through which users engage with and process information that is supporting or contrasting their beliefs about climate change, and the higher the number of used labels the more interpretations can be drawn. Furthermore, in the case of the same fake news has been debunked by several fact-checkers, by comparing the verdicts it will also be possible to verify the agreement between them. Lastly, the set of judgments attributed by factcheckers to the degrees of fakeness, or their proximity to a more factual ontology, of the identified fake news, can offer us an overview of the falsehood through which disinformation is spreading online about climate change in Italy. In particular, what I advance is a lens through which to detect if the narrative references belong to real and factual actors and cases or rather more fictitious imaginaries. Firstly, judgments are not always expressed through synthetic and summarizing verdicts or warning labels, with each fact-checker using different types of truthfulness/falsity in their verdicts. Secondly, when expressed within the analyzed articles, verdicts are displayed in a variety of judgments. Some factcheckers use a wide array of verdicts, while others only have a shorter list of labels (Table 1). Moreover, less than 9% of the sampled debunking articles refer to the same fake news, suggesting a diversified investigative agenda by fact-checkers. Nevertheless, the repeated debunkings show a not very coherent verdict between them, in terms of different labels used to judge the same fake news. For instance, the fake news about the NATO flight which caused a flood has been labeled with the verdicts of “fake news” and “conspiracy theory”. With a detected multiplicity of verdict labels offered by the 6 fact-checkers, what I assume is that such a diversification should be grasped as a variable seriously affecting the way how users processed the debunking messages. Furthermore, and despite this heterogeneity, a comparative simplification of the analyzed judgments of the identified fake news can be seen as which are the types of stories which are fostering the disinformation imaginary. While here it is not intended to identify the effects of the disinformation, the clusterization of similar verdicts is a valuable proxy for detecting the narrative trending elements involved in fake news which can characterize its relative falsehood/truthfulness. In our case, the higher percentage of "out-of-context" and "modified image" together counts for about 30% of the sample, which might indicate that thematization of climate change disinformation draws from a realistic narrative. Conversely, “fake news”, “disinformation” and “conspiracy theory” verdicts are about 33% of the sample, suggesting also a high presence of extreme and fringe narratives that hinder the debate about climate change. Therefore, Image 1 is showing a diversified narrative frame of the fakeness within the sampled contents, with both fake news drawing from real events story plots and purely invented ones. These results shed light on the heterogeneity - as well as the complexity - of the phenomenon of debunking, which displays many shades of fakeness in its judgments of the fake news about climate change. Future research investigations should aim to fill this gap in the thematization of truth by the fact-checking industry, and how, and if, this representation affects users' engagement with debunking news.