Following the worst natural disaster in Spain’s recent history, the country has witnessed an outpour of politically charged conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the government and democratic institutions. While such lies are often created and circulated by a small network, they can quickly spread beyond traditional circles and gain widespread attention. What can be done to stop the spread of disinformation in the wake of catastrophic weather events?
The terrible floods of 29 October in Spain have left more than 200 dead. This fateful date should be remembered in our calendar and collective memory as a reminder of the terrifying impacts of climate change, particularly in poorly structured urbanised areas. The worse global warming becomes, the more we see extreme events such as the so-called DANAs (the meteorological phenomenon that causes torrential rain in south-east Spain). Hotter temperatures also bring about a greater risk of loss of life, economic damage, and social upheaval.
In other words, climate inaction kills. Supported by scientific evidence, this reality seems both tangible and deeply horrifying – especially after the catastrophe in Valencia. However, the looming threat of climate breakdown is far from routine political discourse and kept out of an elusive “common sense”.
The (dis)information mudslide in Valencia
Since 29 October, Spain has witnessed a disinformation campaign with a magnitude comparable to the gravity of the floods. On social media sites and accounts linked to the far right, a storm of denialist mud and reactionary sludge has been set in motion in a coordinated and organic way, downplaying the climate crisis and diverting attention to other issues. Taking advantage of the great emotional pain and rage at the poor management of institutions – mainly autonomous ones – these toxic narratives have followed a well-trodden and popular path to undermine the credibility of the state, its democratic institutions, its public bodies and the press. Because, whether they have read the German philosopher Hannah Arendt or not, they know that she said: “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
This strategy, copied from Trumpism, is already well-established: using hoaxes, lies, and alternative facts to corrupt public debate and social networks, flouting all rules and norms, and targeting scapegoats and internal enemies. In Valencia, with a broad brush, disinformation masters have meticulously applied this plan by spreading hoaxes on social networks and sometimes on some television channels. These rumours have been seen or reproduced by millions of people in Spain and beyond, with strong evidence of external interference. At the centre of the denialist hurricane are the Spanish government, environmentalists, and solidarity NGOs.
According to these narratives and from the perspective of post-Covid conspiracy bubbles, the central government, aside from being progressive and “woke”, can only be considered as bad and maleficent. There can only be one reason for this: the government hides the truth from its citizens. The paradigmatic disinformation case has been the Bonaire car park in the Valencian town of Aldaia: false information was shared on TikTok describing the site as a “cemetery” with thousands of people trapped in their cars, and the issue was shared on prime-time national television channels and across European media. Although this turned out to be completely false as the rescue forces did not find a single dead person inside, the hoax suggested the existence of an underground account of the dead and missing (which was taken up by the Spanish extreme right-wing party, Vox, in the national Congress). Taking advantage of a lack of clearer institutional communication in the first days about the number of dead and missing, this in turn reinforced distrust towards the institutions in charge of managing the crisis. Later, this culminated in verbal and physical attacks on King Felipe VI, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and Valencian President Carlos Mazón during their visit on 3 November to Paiporta, a town severely affected by the floods. Without a firewall against this disinformation, violence can easily jump from the networks to the streets.
The second target is surely the most paradoxical: despite the proven impacts of the climate crisis on the floods in Valencia, the blame for the DANA is laid on … environmentalists. Not only were they mocked for having warned for decades of climate change – which much of the far right still considers a scam or fanaticism – but now they are directly blamed for the terrible consequences of the storm. Beyond denying or minimising the climatic causes (”there have always been floods in these areas”, “however much they now call it a DANA, it is nothing more than a cold spell”, etc.), a long-existing argument from previous crises such as the drought of 2023 reappears: under pressure and orders from environmentalists, dams, built in Francisco Franco’s time, were destroyed, which would have contained the floods, had they still existed. This is an outright lie, since in the last 20 years, only four small dams have been removed in Valencia, in areas that were not affected by the DANA and precisely to avoid overflows and worse floods. But this lie not only spread like wildfire in the denialist galaxy, but also – and perhaps most seriously – beyond its natural borders. This even led to death threats against environmentalists or scientific journalists, viewed as “traitors” in the pay of the UN’s “diabolical” 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its dangerous environmental measures. Once the villains have been clearly identified, the only thing left for the reactionary narrative to do is to raise the hero: the dictator Francisco Franco. Without him, we face the apocalypse. Environmentalists are redundant, and so is democracy.
Finally, the disinformation campaign targets NGOs with a clear objective: to discredit them and take over the monopoly of solidarity in times of crisis. In particular, the social networks of hate and lies relentlessly attack the Red Cross and Caritas. Despite the impressive deployment of these NGOs, with thousands of people helping on the ground, memes and hoaxes are circulating criticising the “scam” of alleged fake Red Cross volunteers. Moreover, dozens of negative responses appear in response to social media posts by these NGOs, accusing them of rejecting and throwing away donations. At the same time, these comments reinforce the underlying, and again false, racist narrative that NGOs give priority aid to migrants and not to Valencians, and directly blame the looting after the DANA on migrants.
This xenophobic rhetoric employs an older and more classic far-right narrative: NGOs embezzle subsidies and/or do not know how to manage aid. Promoters of these narratives include the same people who waste their energy on hoaxes and social media posts to be seen and gain followers. One far-right influencer even went so far as to raise money and propose distributing aid to the affected villages with the most “likes” in the comments. Under the slogan “only the people save the people”, denialist and reactionary populism imagines itself as a substitute for traditional institutions in order to impose a techno-libertarian solidarity: arbitrarily and where profits and the private law of the strongest and most popular prevail.
A lucrative global phenomenon
This climate disinformation strategy will not sound strange to informed readers in other European countries as it is far from a uniquely Spanish phenomenon. On 16 and 17 May 2023, the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna suffered an extreme rainfall event, which, in addition to other factors like poor river and soil management, caused 17 deaths and millions in economic damage. However, as the Italian organisation Facta reports, another false narrative spread widely on social media, attributing both the floods and the related damage to “the specific plan of unidentified actors who intentionally not only caused the rains, but flooded an entire region by voluntarily opening dams and floodgates”.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2023, Greece experienced some of the most destructive wildfires of the 21st century, resulting from a combination of rising temperatures, drought, declining rainfall, and land-use changes. But again, this rational, fact-based explanation was undermined by organised misinformation that wrongly asserted that “forests are burned only to install wind farms so that some individuals can make a profit.” Despite being entirely untrue, The organisation Ellinika Hoaxes reports that “7 out of 10 participants in a survey in Greece said they agreed with the view that most wildfires are arson, while 5 out of 10 said they agreed that wind farms flourish after devastating fires.”
Hoaxes are not merely confined to the conspiracy bubble. The so-called “new denialism” against renewable energies is present throughout Europe and permeates a large part of public opinion. It creates a common sense that allowed, for example, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni to state at COP29 that renewables are not sufficient as an alternative to fossil fuels, but that “gas, biofuels, hydrogen, carbon capture and, in the future, nuclear fusion” are also needed. Meanwhile, during the fires of 2023, the centre-right Greek government used the same means to wriggle out of its lack of preparedness and adaptation to climate events, blaming “certain scientists” for their data publications and hiding behind the excuse of climate change in other countries. Denialism is the flagship of “climate delaying”, i.e. active or passive procrastination in the face of climate emergency.
But it is undoubtedly in the United States that the far-from-innocent climate disinformation strategy has gone the farthest. Disinformer-in-chief Donald Trump, a fervent climate change denier, detractor of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and coiner of the phrase “drill, baby, drill”, a call for more fossil fuel extraction, has just been re-elected. This strategy relies on a powerful network of disinformation that Trump and his supporters used when hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the US in late September and early October 2024, leaving more than 200 people dead and leading to massive destruction of homes and businesses, and more than 160 million people intoxicated by fake news.
As a forewarning of the denialist and xenophobic hoaxes used later in Spain, two culprits emerged: the federal government and migrants. Denying the elephant in the room and moving the focus away from the problem (the effect of climate change in reinforcing hurricanes), Trump himself falsely claimed that the federal administration did not offer assistance or communicate with governors in the affected states. His faithful squire, Elon Musk, using his massive propaganda platform X, commented that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives”, while conspiracy networks accused it of actively blocking donations to victims and seizing assets.
Rather than wearing down Trump’s presidential candidacy, these lies served his interests: today, he reigns over America again; Musk has been appointed to cut back US government spending, and his assets have grown by several billion dollars following the U.S. elections; and the US, one of the main culprits of global climate change, will probably walk away from the Paris Agreement again, pleasing fossil fuel multinationals. While it deeply undermines the fight for climate justice, lying can be very profitable politically and economically for those who know how to use it to their own benefit.
A climate of lies
Faced with this “climate infodemic”, the first thing to do is to abandon any kind of naivety. Disinformation such as that which occurred in Valencia is not an epiphenomenon, but one of the key drivers of a reactionary and denialist agenda at a global level. And nor is it a random phenomenon: it is an ecosystem of a limited number of digital and physical actors that are coordinated, proactive, and totally uninhibited. These actors are fully aware of their capacity to generate lies or half-truths that, beyond their initial bubble, contaminate and condition public debate in order to undermine governments, primarily progressive and climate-concerned, and their democratic institutions. Lastly, it is important to note that disinformation cannot act as a lever to foster institutional accountability. Even in situations of extreme climate emergency, a political truce between the government and opposition forces is not a given. On the contrary, disinformation is likely to accentuate political polarisation and vice versa.
In fact, it is highly likely that the opposition, even if they do not subscribe to conspiracy hoaxes, will use the breeding ground of lies and doubts to attack the government for purposes other than those initially set out by the denialist influencers. This has been the case for the Spanish Partido Popular after the Valencian tragedy: taking advantage of the distrust towards institutions and the political polarisation encouraged by the hoaxes, it sought to divert attention from the mismanagement of the situation by Carlos Mazón, the president of the Valencian Region, who belongs to the party. As part of these efforts, Partido Popular attempted to discredit Teresa Ribera, the then Minister for Ecological Transition in Spain and candidate for vice presidency of the European Commission, which led to further polarisation and casting doubt over the entire second Von der Leyen Commission. In other words, an oligarchy of lies creates hoaxes for its political, economic and cognitive ends. However, these lies later take on a life of their own, permeating, transforming and leaving a toxic well of doubt that others use for their interests. While the two camps may not share exactly the same analysis or objectives, there are synergies between the far-right and the centre-right.
Containing the infodemic
In the context of adaptation measures in the face of the climate emergency, strong responses are required from institutions and civil society. First, there must be zero tolerance for misinformation. Individuals or organisations that spread lies should feel the full force of the law since, in the face of painful climate catastrophes such as those studied in this article, they induce harmful behaviour and violence and undermine the capacity of public authorities to intervene, which in turn endangers the lives and health of many people today and in the future.
At the same time, since justice is slow while misinformation moves quickly, a rapid institutional information response to extreme events such as floods, droughts, or fires is needed. We must act from the first moment and never be naïve in waiting for a moment of national harmony. Government and institutional communication “must be explicitly presented, repeated and defended (…) rather than assumed as a shared reality with political adversaries”.
In addition to the responsibilities of state and public institutions, the social response is also central. Beyond the necessary but insufficient fact-checking initiatives, there is a need for influencers, NGOs, trade unions, media and other actors that are well-educated about the climate crisis and have the capacity to fight for common sense and climate cultural hegemony to do so in the public space. We also need well-known and influential people in the more conservative spheres to convince the those around them about the reality of climate change and its effects because people tend to believe individuals with their own values more than a person outside of their ideological or political sphere. Also, collective strategies (such as crowdsourcing or “anti-disinformation brigades”)5 are needed, and they require bringing together experts, citizens, journalists, scientists and others to detect, verify and disprove false information about extreme events in a collaborative and swift manner.
For this social response to be effective, people must receive tailored climate training as an intrinsic part of their educational curriculum from primary school to university. Such education should include lessons on recognising hoaxes, using rational thinking to defuse them, and making use of social media responsibly.
Finally, structural regulation of social media platforms and networks in all democratic countries is essential to counteract the “Muskian imperialism of disinformation” and to give primacy to reliable sources of information, where journalists with a solid training on the climate crisis can reach audiences.
It is urgent to decisively confront misinformation and use all political, legal and social means at our disposal to fight the climate crisis and protect our institutions. Let us not allow climate inaction and lies to continue killing and polluting our democracies and our future.
This article first appeared here.
Translation by Albie Mills | Voxeurop
