How to resist climate disinformation during Trump 2.0

OPINION By Bryan Giemza

We all knew it was coming. The authors of Project 2025 had already called for the new administration to challenge fundamental scientific findings that led the U.S. federal government to begin regulating greenhouse gases. Now, as The Washington Post reported last week, President Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, appears to be urging the administration to ignore those findings, which have been called the “crown jewel” of U.S. climate research. 

It’s been clear since Trump took office again that he doesn’t want science to get in the way of his agenda. There’s already been a systematic and dangerous assault on facts delivered via Trump’s Truth Social and on Elon Musk’s X platform. Meta’s early 2025 decision to end fact-checking, which was informed by political pressure from the new administration, has raised alarm among experts, exacerbating the unfettered spread of climate falsehoods. 

In the run up to the 2024 election and the wake of Hurricane Helene, false conspiracist claims around weather, government land seizures and geoengineering were weaponized on X for political gain, endangering and undermining FEMA first responders. In February 2025, Arla Foods, a Danish-Swedish dairy company, announced on social media its trial of a feed additive aimed at reducing methane emissions from cows, only to be attacked by conspiracy theorists. 

In addition to being silenced in government channels, climate scientists report a new wave of social media attacks targeting them on newly unmoderated platforms. A recent study found that “40% of climate misinformation tweets are ad hominem attacks and 20% are conspiracy theories. The majority of climate misinformation involves discrediting climate actors and eroding public trust in climate science.”

Climate disinformation and distortions were common during Trump’s first term, but this time around the assault is more coordinated, reckless and dangerous. Beyond swift withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, Trump announced a national energy emergency that experts agree does not exist. Climate research has been defunded, and critical initiatives such as wind farm permits and EV incentives are being rolled back. Many federal planning and informational tools designed to help communities impacted by climate risks have been scrubbed from social media and websites. Expect this memory hole to widen as agencies such as NOAA, the State Department and a hollowed out USAID, all significant stakeholders on climate issues, enter an era of self-censorship to appease the administration.

As the administration purges references to climate and global warming in all of its official communications, it is also withdrawing from the World Health Organization and slashing staff at the CDC with a vaccine skeptic at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services. In the vacuum where the government might usually be expected to provide reliable and actionable information, we can anticipate instead a fertile ground for disinformation and doubtcasting, amplifying the United States’ suddenly rising reputation as an emerging authoritarian state woefully out of step with the global majority in addressing climate change.

So how does the public—and the rest of the world—tackle climate-change disinformation under an administration that is embracing it and spreading it? First, we must understand disinformation not only as a tool to undermine facts, but as a political weapon. In such a landscape, polarizing narratives serve political agendas with misinformation itself becoming a preferred strategy. Whereas disinformation, polarization and democratic backsliding all reinforce each other, “top democratizers conversely reduce the spread of disinformation substantially.”

In recent years, countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Slovenia, South Korea and Zambia have bucked the global trend toward autocracy in part by fighting disinformation. Their common disinformation countermeasures include supporting independent journalism (Zambia), strengthening legal frameworks to develop and enforce laws that address the spread of false information while safeguarding freedom of expression (Moldova) and launching public awareness campaigns (examples include the Metamorphosis Foundation and the Council of Media Ethics in North Macedonia). 

Oddly enough, Brendan Carr and proponents of media accountability might be converging on one solution. Trump’s appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission advocates revising Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that since 1996 has shielded major tech companies—Meta, Google, etc.—from liability over content published on their platforms. Carr, who authored the Project 2025 overhaul of the FCC, would certainly face a wave of industry pushback, but changing Section 230 could result in stricter liability for the harms that flow from climate disinformation, which international courts are increasingly recognizing.

Turning the problem on its head, a positive rights framework would grant citizens a right of access to accurate, trustworthy information from public officials, particularly in their official communications around public health and welfare. Courts have upheld important precedents in this direction (e.g., the Freedom of Information Act). It would be one step toward tamping down dangerous disinformation spread by elected officials. After all, the global medical community, including the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association, deem climate change to be a leading threat to public health. When climate change is a life-or-death matter, we cannot afford to play politics with messaging. 

Embracing optimism, we might also consider what a sizable body of pro-social psychological research has to tell us about harnessing our deeply ingrained instincts for cohesion and positive behavior. Moreover, we might look to other cultural frameworks including Global Majority countries for new insights since virtually all of the research on misinformation interventions is grounded in Western cultural assumptions and studies. Community action cells and citizen environmental collectives, collaborative fact-checking initiatives and local influencers and educational networks have shown some promise for fighting disinformation at scale in countries like Brazil, Pakistan and Ghana.

Meanwhile, the European Union has been far more proactive in countering misinformation of all types, including climate disinformation, by enacting such measures as the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, the European Democracy Action Plan and the East StratCom Task Force. But perhaps the most important legislation to date is the Digital Services Act of 2022, which imposes obligations on online platforms to manage illegal content, ensure transparent advertising and address disinformation. 

To satisfy American First Amendment protections, the U.S. could adapt some of these principles by focusing on speech-neutral platform transparency and accountability, rather than censorship. For example, taking cues from the DSA, the U.S. government could require platforms to disclose how their algorithms amplify or suppress content. With Section 230 reform, platforms could be required to make public whether they engage in “neutral hosting” or “active amplification,” retaining immunity for user-generated content but facing liability if they boost disinformation for engagement. Likewise, for transparency they could be mandated to identify and label ads or content funded by fossil fuel interests or other entities engaging in climate disinformation. 

But in this era of polarized social media misinformation, any right to receive accurate information will face new challenges, so what about solutions on the technological front? Researchers are honing techniques to discern signal from noise in influence campaigns and potentially detect and flag climate misinformation in real time. Others have made promising strides in using chatbots to help disabuse people of conspiracy theories. In the long term, new hybrid digital methods for teaching civic, media and information literacy, based on models from countries such as Finland, hold real promise. Investing in public education as a primary good, ensuring that students are taught from the earliest grades to evaluate evidence, is an overarching measure that confers broad information resilience.

While many U.S. climate scientists face new career challenges and feel targeted, they have nevertheless been dauntless. Now colleagues in the EU and elsewhere are organizing quickly and concentrating their efforts to fund, protect and even host them. They are stepping into the breach to preserve records and pressing ahead with the implementation of climate solutions. And they understand well the dangers of paralysis and normalcy bias, remembering how in times of crisis the U.S. once served as a refuge for science without political interference. 

In the current vacuum of American leadership, new coalitions between the scientific community, climate activists and the international community must and will rise to fight back against climate disinformation. Facts are stubborn things, and authoritarian regimes have long tried to bury inconvenient truths. The Soviets suppressed Chernobyl’s true scale until reality forced their hand. The U.S. government may remove disinformation protections and scrub climate science from its websites, but the wildfires, hurricanes and heatwaves will tell their own story—and the world will be listening.

Bryan Giemza is a professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University and former director of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy where he is conducting research with InfoCitizen and writing a book, “Blowing Smoke: Climate Change and the Global Disinfosphere.”