Climate Watch

Climate change is amongst the most significant threats to public health and modern society, disproportionately affecting low-income communities across the world. Despite this, public perception of climate change remains controversial and misinformation regarding the subject has become more prevalent throughout the years. Major corporations, such as oil companies, stand to make profits and actively hide harmful environmental operations they participate in. Large sums of money are continuously funneled toward generating and spreading climate change denial to protect companies’ self-interests. This includes influencers, political or otherwise, who are paid to spread propaganda; news sources running stories downplaying the human impact on the environment; bots leaving an exorbitant amount of comments in every corner of the internet, and taking over old social media profiles to spam mass-generated posts that are designed to appear genuine.

Our goal is to create a Google Chrome extension similar to Grammarly, that will monitor the content of the web page the user is viewing and provide real-time feedback regarding the climate misinformation contained on the web page. We understand that sometimes it’s hard for users to accept they’re engaging with misinformation, particularly if the misinformation is published on a website the user frequents. With this in mind, our solution to the problem will be approached sensitively. Our goal is to provide users with suggested links to external sources with accurate climate information and give them the opportunity to research the issue further. We feel it’s important to make the user feel as though they’re choosing to participate in digesting the correct information, and not that it’s being forced upon them.