Hacker News Reader

The article states the bots were on the side of denialism.

> On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

> Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action”, the analysis states.

There isn't anything pushing it. The situation is more like a bridge that is about to collapse and everyone is asking themselves: What is the smallest action that we can take to fix the problem? The incentives are toward inaction.

Arguing that there's more money in doing real climate science vs fossil fuels is insanity.

from the article:

> substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages