Infosecurity.sk, in cooperation with the International Republican Institute’s Beacon Project, monitored posts concerning the European Green Deal present in the Slovak-language Facebook space between 20 April-20 September 2022 using the CrowdTangle tool. This monitoring is a part of a larger IRI initiative implemented simultaneously in five EU countries.
Key takeaways:
- Few actors communicated Green Deal-related topics during the research period, receiving only minimal interactions on Facebook posts. However, the posts were more likely to engage positive or neutral sentiment.
- Relevant actors, such as EU institutions, published most of the posts. The number of posts on the topic published by Slovak political actors was limited.
- Due to the low number of posts on the topic, whether their content represents the general opinion in Slovak society cannot be concluded.
Recommendations:
- The high number of posts published by official EU institutions and their branches in Slovakia, in proportion to the posts of problematic sources, on the topic of the Green Deal points to a wide space that is not yet largely overwhelmed by disinformation or conspiracy narratives. The institutions should prepare tools that may be used in several scenarios, meaning preventing and reacting to potential disinformation or conspiracy narratives.
- In our view, considerable space is open for domestic political representatives, who currently present environmental and climate issues only minimally. However, the reluctance to communicate the topic significantly narrows the societal debate and continues to reduce trust in the EU. Among the relevant actors there are also media, news agencies, or other non-state organizations such as think tanks, which are also responsible for communicating such crucial issues.
- Both official institutions and the relevant media could create a new platform for debunking myths about climate change and European green policies, assign the topics to debunking centers dedicated to such activity, and promote the findings of existing platforms that are already doing so.
- In our opinion, it is also suitable to raise awareness of the Green Deal through the tools offered by the education system, i.e. to include teaching about EU measures, including climate legislation, in the curriculum.
You can find more information in the PDF file below.
The article was conducted with the support of IRI
