How to Fight Fake News About Climate Change: The FLICC strategy

Desciption

Misinformation is a virus that is always found alongside information on the climate crisis. And especially when climate impacts are most severe, it comes back to infect the news, undermining the understanding of climate change’s relevance in the public sphere. There are many tools to keep the virus away, such as reporting facts and using fact-checking techniques, but it is even more useful to “vaccinate” against fake news.

For decades, the award-winning Australian professor John Cook has been studying the cognitive psychology of climate science denial. His research focus is understanding and countering science denial, using critical thinking and inoculation to build public resilience against misinformation. We believe that an important component of debunking of the myths about climate change is identifying the denial techniques in each fake news.

In this session, the audience will be presented to the five techniques most used on climate fake news: FLICC (Fake Experts, Logical Fallacies, Impossible Expectations, Conspiracy Theories, Cherry Picking). They will learn how to identify those techniques and the best ways (based in academic research) to properly debunk them. This will give the audience a powerful tool that help us neutralize the lies and contribute to a more informed public opinion about climate change. The lecture will be presented by the Brazilian biologist and journalist Jaqueline Sordi, an award-winning professional who’s been working with Dr. Cook to popularize this important debunking strategy to fight climate denial.