The German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative worked with MediaCloud to examine misinformation and disinformation related to the climate-change activist Greta Thunberg, a young climate activist who was smeared by a number of conspiracy theories. We focused on a key period analyzing how narratives spread, whether one can discern strategic disinformation promotion, and how platform practices might address the promotion of conspiracy theories.
Focusing on the period after Thunberg began her weekly school strikes in the summer of 2018 and continuing through October 2019, just after the global climate strikes and her speech at the United Nations General Assembly, we identified five key narratives about her:
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