Blueprint of a smokescreen: Introducing the validated climate disinformation corpus for behavioural research on...

Behavioural science research has the potential to develop evidence-based strategies to fight disinformation about climate science and climate mitigation action; however, this research has yet to be conducted systematically with validated sets of climate disinformation stimuli. Here, we present the Climate Disinformation Corpus, a collection of climate disinformation statements designed to systematize experimental research testing future disinformation interventions. Using computational social science techniques, we gathered climate disinformation stimuli from the social media platform Twitter/X. We identified 78 statements containing disinformation about the existence, the causes, the consequences of climate change, the reliability and objectivity of climate scientists, and arguing for the delay of climate policies. The Climate Disinformation Corpus showed good heterogeneity across 15 validation measures (e.g., perceived persuasiveness, perceived trustworthiness, and sharing intentions) in a validation study involving a representative sample of N = 503 British participants. Furthermore, the climate disinformation statements were correlated with four individual differences measures related to belief in climate science and support for climate actions, congruently with theoretical expectations. We conclude with practical suggestions on implementing the Climate Disinformation Corpus in disinformation research according to different research questions.