Towards Designing Social Interventions for Online Climate Change Denialism Discussions

2025-07-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the scarcity of scientific discourse in online climate denialist communities. We propose a hybrid social intervention strategy integrating human-crafted design with generative AI, deployed via transparent bot accounts on Reddit’s climate-related subreddits. Interventions deliver scientifically grounded, linguistically authentic, and ideologically neutral content, supported by both manual qualitative analysis and automated response mechanisms. Our contributions are threefold: (1) the first application of generative AI to produce context-aware, stance-transcending interventions; (2) the use of “transparent bots” to ensure traceability and minimize adversarial reactions; and (3) empirical evidence that neutral, evidence-based interventions significantly increase openness to dialogue among deniers, while supporters spontaneously augment interventions with additional scientific content—enabling cross-stance knowledge co-construction. These findings establish a scalable, reproducible, AI-augmented social intervention paradigm for countering online conspiracy theories and epistemic polarization.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

Abstract

As conspiracy theories gain traction, it has become crucial to research effective intervention strategies that can foster evidence and science-based discussions in conspiracy theory communities online. This study presents a novel framework using insider language to contest conspiracy theory ideology in climate change denialism on Reddit. Focusing on discussions in two Reddit communities, our research investigates reactions to pro-social and evidence-based intervention messages for two cohorts of users: climate change deniers and climate change supporters. Specifically, we combine manual and generative AI-based methods to craft intervention messages and deploy the interventions as replies on Reddit posts and comments through transparently labeled bot accounts. On the one hand, we find that evidence-based interventions with neutral language foster positive engagement, encouraging open discussions among believers of climate change denialism. On the other, climate change supporters respond positively, actively participating and presenting additional evidence. Our study contributes valuable insights into the process and challenges of automatically delivering interventions in conspiracy theory communities on social media, and helps inform future research on social media interventions.

Problem

• Designing social interventions for online climate change denialism discussions
• Investigating reactions to evidence-based messages in Reddit communities
• Developing AI-based methods for delivering pro-social interventions

Innovation

• Using insider language to contest conspiracy theories
• Combining manual and AI-based message crafting
• Deploying interventions via transparent bot accounts