Online climate misinformation often borrows the look and feel of scientific figures and charts to gain legitimacy, according to a new study. The analysis highlights the importance of images and aesthetics in spreading climate misinformation, in contrast to previous studies that have largely focused on its content.

“It’s no longer just about what is said, but how it is shown,” says study team member Anton Törnberg, a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The findings reflect the rise of popular internet platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that integrate images and text elements so that they amplify and modulate each other’s meanings.

Törnberg and Petter Törnberg, a computational social scientist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, analyzed 17,848 online text-and-image posts published between 2010 and 2023 by eight key players in the climate denial movement in Sweden.

In the past it has been difficult to analyze large amounts of such multimodal data at once. But now AI can help. The researchers used CLIP, a neural network that allows combined analysis of text and images, and a tool known as BERTopic to organize the posts by topic.

The patterns in the data were striking. “Much of this content borrows the look and feel of science: technical graphs, neutral colors, and data-heavy visuals that give an aura of objectivity, even when the message itself is misleading,” Törnberg says.

 

 

“Many of these posts look like they come straight out of a research paper or a report from a climate conference. But they twist or cherry-pick data to cast doubt on established science,” he adds. “We call this ‘scientific mimicry’: a way of performing rationality and credibility while undermining the scientific consensus.”

Meanwhile, the climate movement is portrayed as emotional and irrational, with images of shouting and crying activists. Denialist posts also invoke images of Chinese Communism and Nazism to suggest that climate activists are ideological, totalitarian, and even cult-like – in contrast to the sober, “scientific” rationalism of climate denial.

These aesthetic gambits also cast the purveyors of climate misinformation as neutral, objective observers, and climate activists as overly political. This may help climate misinformation reach and appeal to a broader, less politically engaged audience.

The researchers are now diving deeper into how climate misinformation is received by audiences, examining how these multimodal posts spread across internet platforms and interact with their algorithms.

In the meantime, the findings sound a clear message for those who aim to combat climate misinformation. “We need to think beyond facts and start addressing form,” Törnberg says. “Fact-checking alone isn’t enough, because misinformation often succeeds not by presenting alternative facts, but by presenting a more emotionally or visually compelling story.”

Source: Törnberg A. and P. Törnberg.  “The aesthetics of climate misinformation: computational and multimodal framing analysis with BERTopic and CLIP.” Environmental Politics 2025.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.