2025/09/08 by Anton Törnberg, Petter Törnberg · 1 voice · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Climate change #Framing (construction) #Media Influence and Health #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Multimodality #Perception
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09644016.2025.2557684
published in Environmental Politics 35(5), 1070-1093 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2025/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Climate misinformation today is increasingly conveyed through multimodal content, where images and text interact to shape meaning, emotional resonance, and enhance credibility. Yet, research on climate misinformation has rarely explored how these modes work in tandem. This paper introduces a multimodal analytical framework to examine climate-related visual misinformation. Analyzing 17,848 image-text posts, we combine BERTopic, CLIP, and qualitative framing analysis to investigate how climate denialist narratives are constructed. Our findings reveal a paradoxical communication strategy: the movement appropriates scientific aesthetics – graphs, statistics, and technical imagery – to contest the scientific consensus, projecting rationality, authority, and masculine self-control. In contrast, climate advocates are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery. These contrasting multimodal framings supports a strategy of strategic depoliticization, presenting ideological claims as neutral, objective truths. We argue that understanding climate misinformation requires moving beyond factual accuracy to examine the multimodal forms through which it gains legitimacy and emotional power.