Spanish far-right and environmental disinformation. VOX's obstructionist discourse on the climate crisis on Twitter

Abstract

The democratisation of information on the Internet has not only allowed users to interact and share information, but has also had some negative consequences, such as the proliferation of misinformation on social networks. Radical right-wing movements, which have experienced growth in the last decade, have contributed to this situation by promoting the spread of erroneous ideas and conspiracies on matters of general interest, such as the climate crisis (Hultman et al., 2019; Vowles & Hultman, 2021). The main objective of this research is to study whether the Spanish far-right party VOX promotes disinformation about the climate crisis. Thus, we aim to verify if their discourse on Twitter contributes to discouraging the adoption of policies against the climate crisis and analyse the interpretative frames they rely on (anti-scientific, economic, political, or alternative). For this research, we collected messages posted between September 2022 and March 2023 (six months) by VOX on three Twitter accounts: the party, the national leader (Santiago Abascal), and the leader of the Autonomous Community of Madrid (Rocío Monasterio). An intentional search was conducted among over 6,000 tweets from these three accounts to identify messages related to the climate crisis, environmentalism, and sustainability. Finally, we obtained a sample of 95 messages, which underwent a content analysis to study the presence of obstructionism. This research has revealed that VOX's discourse on the climate crisis on Twitter prioritises economic and political obstructionist elements by interpreting the issue in national terms and as a popular sacrifice against the elites.