Eco-bot.net: an art project that scans tweets for corporate greenwash during Cop26
There’s a plethora of artistic interventions at COP26 - see these from Ev Devlin and this compendium - but for sheer ubiquity and utility we like Eco-bot.net.
From Creative Review:
Artists and activists Robert Del Naja (also founding member of Massive Attack) and Bill Posters, perhaps best known for his eerie celebrity deepfakes, have teamed up with green energy industralist Dale Vince on a platform called Eco-Bot.Net.
The project is many things: a resource for reporters, a call to arms, and what Posters calls a “network-based performance”. It’s also a clear condemnation of the key players in spreading climate change ‘disinformation’ or ‘greenwashing’ – whether that’s big energy firms or big tech.
“We’re talking about three of the world’s largest social media platforms with over four billion users, and none of them have effective policies to limit the harms caused by climate change disinformation or corporate greenwashing, They always say there’s no threat of immediate harm. This is their default PR position,” says Posters, who was lead artist on the project with Del Naja.
Del Naja tells us that the project was originally intended to run as part of Massive Attack’s Liverpool event several months ago, which the group cancelled when it transpired that an arms fair was taking place at the same venue, and instead shifted focus to Cop26 instead. Rather than stage a physical stunt in Glasgow, the team instead infiltrated the digital spaces where these activities are rife, both with their own Eco-Bot.Net platform and social media activity.
To scour for disinformation, the system pulls in data from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and searches for words and phrases that may fall into this category, as well as searching for content published by known actors like “disinformation entities or organisations”, Posters says. Positive matches are funnelled into databases and the in-house team of (human) journalists will moderate each post and apply easy-to-understand groupings: ‘it’s not real’, ‘it’s not us,’ ‘it’s not bad’, ‘the expert’s unreliable’, or ‘climate solutions won’t work’.
Data is then turned into visualisations and flagged on social media like a health warning. Adopting such language ties into what the artists want social media companies to be doing with this content. “If you can build a flagging system to limit the harms from Covid-19 disinformation, and do that pretty effectively when … there wasn’t really consensus around the science in many ways, why can’t you do something for the climate when the consensus has been resolute for almost 40 years?” Posters says.
The process is similar for corporate greenwashing content, however another system is instead used to comb Facebook and Instagram for ads listed as “political or issue-based”, which have been published this year. In particular they’re searching for sponsored posts by heavy polluters or emitters, like carbon majors.