They are called “Ben”, “Brianna”, “Emma”, “Caitlin” or “Chloe”. On Twitter, many are selling the merits of climate protection taken by the United Arab Emirates and Sultan al-Jaber, president of the next COP and leader of an oil giant. But these accounts all have one problematic thing in common: it doesn’t exist.
These are fake profiles identified by researchers as “American blondes”. Impossible to find any trace of their existence elsewhere online, and their photos were probably generated with artificial intelligence. All relay similar messages and were created within hours in August 2022, according to an analysis conducted by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), which brings together several non-governmental organizations.
“Designed to discredit COP28 and climate talks”
Specialists interviewed by AFP have identified dozens of accounts involved in pro-Emirati offensives: this is the principle of “astroturfing”, a technique aimed at influencing and manipulating opinion on social networks. A COP28 spokesperson told AFP that these accounts were “generated by unknown outside actors and unrelated to COP28” and were “clearly designed to discredit COP28 and discussions on the climate “.
COP28 also said it reported these accounts to Twitter, and asked the platform to take “immediate action to end these activities”. Many accounts appear to have since been suspended.
partisan accounts
As a reminder, as soon as his appointment was announced, American and European political representatives had called on Sultan al-Jaber to abandon his role as President of COP28, believing that as head of the Emirati national oil company ADNOC, he was in a position of conflict of interest.
When Romain Ioualalen of the NGO Oil Change International expressed concern on Twitter that COP28 would “slow down the transition away from fossil fuels”, “Caitlin”, a “lawyer” based in Dubai, replied that Sultan al-Jaber could on the contrary be “a game-changer”, while “Emma”, an “ecologist”, praised her “passion for climate action”.
A fake face generator
After the Center for Climate Reporting (CCR) accused Al Jaber’s entourage of editing pages on Wikipedia to downplay his role as head of ADNOC, accounts claiming to be non-Emirati youth aware of climate change also counter-attacked, explained to AFP the director of the CCR, Lawrence Carter. One of their profile pictures watermarked the address of an online fake face generator and several others came from image banks.
Diogo Pacheco, a computer science researcher at the University of Exeter, told AFP after reviewing several accounts they appeared “inauthentic”, noting that some had changed their username or bio after being reported. . “It would be very unusual for real people to create and use this type of fake profile photos,” said Katharina Kleinen von Koenigsloew, professor of communication sciences at the University of Hamburg.
Evidence difficult to obtain
CAAD described a “coordinated effort” involving at least 28 accounts promoting the Gulf country and featuring “suspicious patterns” of tweets. Online disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones has identified 93 accounts involved in the campaign, some of which were created more than two years ago, he told AFP. They mainly focused on giving visibility to the COP28 account, he explained.
“Usually, in these kinds of operations, it is a company specialized in public relations that disseminates the messages,” added Marc Owen Jones, from Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, a rival country of the United Arab Emirates. “But it’s very difficult to get proof of that,” he added. Prior to billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year, the platform said it had removed accounts linked to “state-backed information operations” in Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates.
Regarding accounts tweeting about COP28, Jamie Henn, group director of the NGO Fossil Free Media, told AFP that in more than ten years of monitoring the UN climate negotiations, he had never seen a disinformation campaign of such magnitude.