Dataset for: Blueprint of a smokescreen: introducing the validated Climate Disinformation Corpus for behavioral research on combating climate disinformation

Actions to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are urgently needed but face societal inertia due to decades of climate disinformation and discourses of policy delay. Behavioral science research has the potential to develop evidence-based strategies to fight disinformation; however, this research has not been conducted systematically nor with validated sets of climate disinformation stimuli that would enable researchers and practitioners to reliably evaluate and compare the effectiveness of behavioral interventions. Using computational social science techniques, we gathered n = 20’000 climate disinformation stimuli from the social media platform Twitter and conducted a validation study involving a representative sample of N = 503 British participants. We present the Climate Disinformation Corpus, a collection of climate disinformation statements designed to systematize experimental research on future disinformation interventions. We identified seventy-eight 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 by redirecting and minimizing responsibility, pushing non-transformative solutions, emphasizing the downsides of climate actions, or surrendering to climate change consequences. The Climate Disinformation Corpus showed good heterogeneity across fifteen validation measures (e.g., perceived persuasiveness, perceived trustworthiness, and sharing intentions) taken from established disinformation research guidelines. 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.