Hi, Matthew, how are you? Can you hear me all right?
Yes, no problem at all.
This is Matthew. He grew up in the UK but has been living in New Zealand for the past
20 years. His home is an hour’s drive south of Auckland in the outskirts of Hamilton City.
It's semi-rural. It's not right out in the sticks. Earlier this year, he began to feel troubled by
the New Zealand government’s response to the pandemic.
It’s just Covid, Covid, Covid, nothing but Covid in the news every single day. It just
seemed to be an awful lot of fear mongering. Matthew increasingly turned to social media
for his news, and to find community. It’s quite comforting to be able to find
like-minded people in a safe environment like Telegram, which is non-judgmental.
These online groups exposed him to completely unfounded conspiracies – that sinister global
plots are behind the Covid-19 pandemic. This whole campaign of fear and propaganda is
an attempt to try and drive some agenda. Recently there’s been a change in the type
of content on these groups. Matthew was seeing messages not only with misleading claims about
Covid - but also about climate change. And holding conspiratorial, sometimes
extreme views is affecting his relationships. In fact, Matthew wasn’t talking to us from the
comfort of his house, but hidden at the end of his garden so that his partner - who is
concerned about climate change - couldn’t hear what he was talking to us about.
I’m Marianna Spring, I’m the BBC’s Specialist Disinformation and Social Media reporter,
and this is the Denial Files, a series that looks at how disinformation is threatening the
fight to prevent climate catastrophe. For this episode I wanted to look at
something I’ve noticed begin to emerge in the past few months.
Because of my job I spend a lot of time in online groups speaking to people
who believe Covid is a hoax or who, like Matthew, object to wearing masks or getting vaccinated.
These views are often contrary to scientific evidence.
And recently I’ve seen a marked shift. Some members of this online movement
are turning their attention from Covid and towards climate change - and now the
latest research suggests the natural world is becoming a new frontline for disinformation.
But let’s get back to Matthew in his garden. New Zealand has been very effective at handling
the pandemic. In a country with a population of five million, there have only been a few
thousand cases. But for Matthew, strict lockdown measures have been a source of frustration.
We're told by our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern that we mustn't talk to our neighbours. So
naturally, people go online to find their connections.
As he joined different channels and groups on Telegram, he found kinship with people nearby.
We're starting to get a few more people out on a fortnightly basis. Protesting lockdowns
and the gradual erosion of democracy and freedom of speech.
One of the groups he joined is part of an anti-lockdown network named White Rose.
It's not run by any one or two people. It's kind of a decentralised community organisation. You can
obtain stickers and then post them on lamp posts. These stickers bear slogans with conspiratorial
content - like “Resist the new normal”, “Real men don’t wear masks”, and simply,
“There is no pandemic”. Do you ever stick up stickers?
Oh, look, I have done a few just for a bit of a laugh. It's amazing how quickly
they get pulled down. Where do you put them?
Just on a few lamp posts here and there, you know?
Matthew sent me some pictures of what he’d stuck up. One shows a gloved hand about to inject a
child. Across the image are the words “If you tolerate this, then your children will be next”.
Is that how you joined the group? Did you actually come across a sticker?
I did come across a sticker, yeah. I think a lot gets shared between Telegram groups as well. So
if you're a member of one Telegram group, quite often you'll get linked to another Telegram group
because things just get shared around and then you just end up in a big spider web of information.
It’s a spider web of information that is going through something of an evolution.
On some of these Telegram channels, there’s been a pivot to a different type of belief.
I’m sceptical about climate change. There needs to be more debate around
whether mankind is responsible for it. I noticed on the White Rose New Zealand channel
you'd used that phrase “duped by alarmist climate change and Covid propaganda”.
How much do you see those two things aligning – Covid and climate change?
I think there's a general
opinion that the climate change phenomenon and the pandemic are all part of a movement
towards what's known as the Great Reset, that you're probably quite familiar with that term.
The Great Reset is something I’ve heard a lot during my reporting on disinformation.
It’s an unfounded conspiracy theory that a global elite is using the pandemic to establish a shadowy
New World Order, a supergovernment that will control the lives of citizens around the world.
This whole campaign of fear and propaganda is an attempt to try and drive some agenda.
It doesn't matter whether it's climate change or a virus or something else.
Exactly what that agenda is - and what the connection is between being
anti-lockdown and being resistant to climate change measures - can
be hard to unpick. But some new research can help us join the dots.
Increasingly terminology around Covid-19 measures are being used to stoke fear and
mobilise against climate action. Jennie King is from the Institute
of Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that researches global disinformation trends.
There are movements and groups who are absolutely poised to jump on some form of economic, social or
political crisis as an opportunity to get their pre-existing worldview into the public domain.
We saw that happening with Covid-19, where hate actors, disinformation actors, conspiracy groups
all found grist to the mill within the narrative of the pandemic. And now you're seeing it happen
with climate change in that this isn't really about climate as a policy issue,
it's the fact that these are really neat vectors to get themes like power, personal freedom,
agency, citizen against state, loss of traditional lifestyles – to get all of
those ideas to a much broader audience. One way that ISD has seen this play out is
around the term “climate lockdown”. It’s used to refer to the completely unfounded idea that
in the future we might have Covid-style lockdowns to counteract climate change.
Climate lockdown is a conspiracy that we've seen emerge since March 2020,
which very explicitly uses and weaponises the language of Covid-19
to imply that there will be drastic measures implemented by governments globally under
the auspices of climate change to strip people of their personal freedoms and their civil liberties.
The term has already found popularity with YouTubers who peddle conspiracy theories.
This isn’t going to end with Covid-19. You’ll also hear louder calls for climate lockdowns!
We spoke with two climate scientists who told us that climate lockdowns were not
a serious mitigation strategy for countering climate change. For one thing - they wouldn’t
work. During Covid-19 lockdowns, for instance, the decrease in greenhouse gas emissions were
marginal - certainly not anywhere near enough needed to tackle climate change.
And there’s something else at play here too. In some ways, the very real distress
caused by Covid and lockdowns has helped lay the groundwork for this messaging to be effective.
Coming out of Covid-19, there is a tangible example of where civil liberties or people's
freedom of movement were restricted for emergency measures in a way that they had never
experienced before. And so now it's very easy to capitalise on that sense of trauma and grievance
and fear monger about all of these hypothetical situations that might happen in the future,
including in relation to climate change. Even Matthew, the man I spoke to in New Zealand,
admits the groups he’s in are full of conspiratorial ideas.
Some of them get put forward on these Telegram groups around, you know, there's a bunch of
people pulling all the strings and controlling the world… and blah blah blah. I think it's more
around a confluence of vested interests, the governments, the media, corporations.
Holding these beliefs is having a real impact on his life. His views set him apart from the
people he’s closest to. He doesn’t want his partner overhearing our conversation. And
recently he felt uncomfortable because his daughter - aged nine - was doing a climate
change presentation at school. And with climate change becoming
a more and more urgent issue, that situation is likely to intensify.
And do you ever think that in some ways, it's easier to believe that this
is all alarmist than to actually think, Oh, this could end really badly?
No, no, I think it's easier to go along with the narrative. It's like Neo in The Matrix, isn't it.
It's much easier to have taken the blue pill and just go along with everything.
Have you taken the red pill? I have taken the red pill
and I have woken up every day the last three or four months, feeling very anxious about
the world and what's happening. And I often wish I hadn't. I wish I felt differently.
I wish I could walk along the street and not feel angry at other people for wearing masks.
According to researchers at ISD, of all the White Rose Groups - the one in New Zealand has become
one of the most polluted with discussion about climate change – claiming that it’s overplayed,
a hoax - just like Covid - and part of a shady plot for powerful people to make more money.
But it’s not just White Rose where this is playing out. In online groups across the world,
the fear and distress caused by Covid are morphing into new forms online.
And for communities where the climate crisis is a devastating reality - rather than something
far off in the future - the effects of this disinformation are already being keenly felt.
Our reporter Jessica Bateman in Germany is looking at how this has played out.
It was on the evening of July 14th that Andreas Geron realised something was wrong.
At Wednesday evening at 7pm, we knew there was a big flood coming.
Andreas is the mayor of Sinzig, a town in Western Germany on the banks of the Ahr river.
Heavy rain had been falling for a couple of days. I don't move my car out of the garage because it's
impossible that water is coming to my house. It's too far away.
In the middle of the night, Andreas went to check on the river.
I was at the Ahr in the night at 1am. And the Ahr was in its bed.
And then two hours later, the Ahr was in my house. The water was coming so quickly.
Across Western Germany, residents were waking up to find their lives profoundly altered.
Germany’s then Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the scenes of devastation.
This is a natural disaster but the fact it’s taken place in this way is certainly connected
to the fact climate change is progressing at a speed we have observed for a while.
In Andreas’s town of Sinzig, 14 lives were lost.
Houses and bridges were destroyed. Critical infrastructure was wiped out.
There was no water, no energy, no mobile phone. We had no internet. We were alone.
Although connection to the outside world had been severed,
a battle on German social media was already emerging - one that contested the reality
on the ground in places like Sinzig at the exact moment the residents most needed help.
It was happening on Facebook and on sites of helping people, of helping organisations.
Emergency services were slow to reach people in more remote areas, where infrastructure such
as bridges had been destroyed. But online, this was spun as being deliberate, or even planned.
People said the city is pulling rescue workers out. Pulling out paramedics,
pulling out the fire service. But that was not true. We were dependent on rescue servers.
So Jess, you said this was being shared on Facebook and on rescue websites.
Where else were these false rumours spreading? They were all over Covid conspiracy platforms.
And there was one place in particular where lots of the online disinformation was originating.
Accounts affiliated with the Querdenken were central to this misleading information.
What is the Querdenken? They’re an anti-lockdown movement. Some members
have known links to extremist groups and have compared themselves to the White Rose Movement.
And as well as rumours that emergency services were being rejected from the area,
influential Querdenken conspiracy figures claimed the flood was planned by politicians,
and that so-called “weather manipulation” may have been to blame.
These claims rapidly spread through Querdenken-affiliated Telegram channels,
and groups were quickly formed urging followers to travel to the area.
My name is Dan Stein, I’m from Berlin, and I was a helper at the flood for one week, actually I was
one of the first responders there. I heard about it in the news and I said, Man, you know what,
these people need help. Definitely. On Dan’s Telegram account there are videos
of him burning masks. He shares anti-vaccine posts. And he is sceptical about climate change.
He also believed that the rescue workers were being told to not come and help.
There was the Red Cross, there was the fire brigade, but they had to wait and they were
not supposed to go to the flood area. They were waiting there. They didn't get the order from top.
And where did you get that information from?
You can find it anywhere on Telegram. Honestly.
There’s no evidence that this happened. And it’s a claim that Andreas firmly rejects.
Every volunteer was welcome in Sinzig and the Ahrweil.
In the chaos and confusion of those early days of the flood’s aftermath,
when information was hard to verify, the online disinformation turned into action.
A car drove through the street and a man shouted, “The flood is coming again.
Save yourselves. And the neighbours, they drove away frightened. But no flood was coming again.
The person in the car tried to spread panic. So people were coming to Sinzig to actively
spread confusion about the flood. A police investigation was opened but residents and the
mayor still haven’t discovered who the man was. And there was more. According to the emergency
services, Querdenken members were harassing and intimidating volunteers. At a camp that had been
set up for rescue workers, they snuck in to take pictures of people and documents containing their
personal details. In one town, a Querdenken-linked group even took over an empty school.
For Andreas, there was a clear connection between the move from Covid denial to spreading
disinformation in the flood-affected areas. They are always searching for a new crisis
to misinform and they will use the next crisis to misinform again. When authorities
say it's red, they say it's green. When we say it's green, they say it's red.
Left to rebuild a devastated town, the people of Sinzig know that things aren’t quite so simple.
In the opinion of the Querdenker, the world is easy, every problem has an easy answer.
But that's not true, you know it. We need help every day. Actually, we need help every day.
This is the front line emerging around the world. In rural suburbs, on city lamp posts, from New
Zealand to Germany. Climate change is only going to become a bigger and bigger issue - not just for
governments but in our daily lives. The battle over the narrative is already intensifying.
These early skirmishes may just be the beginning. My thanks to Jessica Bateman for that report and
to the rest of the team for their work on this episode – producer Ant Adeane,
series producer Vibeke Venema, and editors Mike Wendling and Ed Main.