PLEA Network

22 July 2025, DeSmog: Extreme Weather Events are the New Frontline of Online Climate Denial – Report.  Social media posts by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones received 408 million views – more than emergency services and mainstream media combined. Climate science deniers are flooding social media with false claims during extreme weather events, drowning out reliable information and putting lives at risk. A new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which researches and campaigns against online hatred and disinformation, finds that anti-climate figures are increasingly spreading false information about wildfires and hurricanes fuelled by climate change. CCDH looked at some of the most popular misleading social media posts spread by influential climate science deniers between April 2023 and April 2025, using DeSmog’s climate disinformation database to identify the most prominent deniers. Analysing Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube, it found that three quarters of the most popular misleading posts about extreme weather events focused on hurricanes and wildfires.  These posts received hundreds of million of views across the two year period, spreading doubt about the causes of the disasters and even maligning the work of emergency responders. The wildfires in Los Angeles (LA), California, earlier this year, which killed at least 30 people and destroyed thousands of homes, accounted for 38 percent of the posts. Hurricane Helene, which hit south-eastern U.S. in September 2024 and caused more than 250 deaths, accounted for 14 percent of the posts. Baseless claims made by U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during the LA wildfires received 408 million views on X. Jones claimed without evidence that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was “confiscating food” and that the fires were a “globalist” plot. These posts received more views on X than the information distributed on the platform by 10 key emergency response accounts – including FEMA, the fire department, and local government – and the 10 largest U.S. news outlets. Read more here