Half of Europeans cannot tell whether what they read about climate on social media is true or false because of manufactured media campaigns. To this now epidemic problem, the European Commission has decided to respond with a toolkit-the #ClimateFactsMatter campaign-created together with theEuropean Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and the EU DisinfoLab.
The finding comes from the latest Special Eurobarometer on Climate Change, published in 2025: 49% of EU citizens say they have difficulty distinguishing reliable climate information from false information online. 52% believe their country’s mainstream media do not clearly explain causes and impacts of the climate crisis.
Beyond denialism
Denying the existence of global warming has become difficult as summers get hotter and floods more frequent. Those who produce disinformation know this, and they have changed tactics: today they do not deny the phenomenon, they sow doubt about its severity, human origin, and the effectiveness of solutions. Softer arguments, the European Commission itself calls them, but no less dangerous.
EDMO and EU DisinfoLab document this evolving case history each month. Narratives change shape following the political agenda: when discussing emissions regulation, “studies” appear that challenge its economic effectiveness; when discussing renewables, content circulates that emphasizes problems and downplays progress. The mechanism is the same: real data decontextualized, amplified via social, and the algorithm does the rest.
Five moves not to take the bait
The #ClimateFactsMatter kit proposes five practical indicators.
First, climate disinformation rarely invents figures, it selects them. A real figure isolated from context can support any narrative. Checking multiple reliable sources, from the IPCC to Copernicus, is the quickest way to see the whole picture.
Second, many “experts” circulating online do not have the credentials they claim, or have them in fields far removed from climatology. Verifying who is speaking and who is funding them takes a few minutes.
Third, if a piece of content disproportionately angers or frightens, it is worth stopping. Emotional language is the most proven tool for bypassing critical reasoning and pushing impulsive sharing.
Fourth, climate change has no quick and painless solutions. Those who propose them are almost certainly simplifying a problem that has no boundaries.
Fifth, the newest: artificial intelligence-generated images-disasters that never happened, nonexistent technologies-are increasingly used in climate disinformation. Zooming in on details or doing a reverse image search before sharing can help debunk yet another climate hoax.
The numbers that don’t move
The IPCC has concluded unequivocally that human greenhouse gas emissions have caused the current warming. The Copernicus program certifies that Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. The European Environment Agency has reported a 37 percent reduction in EU emissions since 1990-a real achievement, systematically obscured by the noise of misinformation.
85 percent of Europeans consider climate change a serious problem, says Eurobarometer again. A very high percentage, but one that coexists with that of online disorientation, which affects nearly one in two Europeans. This is not a contradiction: one can be convinced that the problem exists and be equally vulnerable to narratives that confuse solutions or fuel helplessness. That is the goal of those who produce disinformation.
Literacy as an antidote
Around #ClimateFactsMatter, the Commission has built a broader ecosystem: EuroClimateCheck for continuous fact-checking, the EU Climate Action Academy, an educational kit for secondary schools, and the Creative Media program for cross-border media literacy. On the regulatory side, the Digital Services Act imposes transparency obligations on platforms on algorithms, but the pace of regulation is struggling to keep up with that of technological evolution.
That 52 percent of Europeans who do not trust the mainstream media on climate reporting also says something to journalism: we need to build trust with clear language and a narrative that does not oscillate between catastrophism and indifference. Climate disinformation is a strategy to slow down policies that disrupt established interests. The European kit will not stop it, but it can give citizens the tools to recognize it.
