abstract
- As social animals, our beliefs and much of our feelings and behaviors regarding the climate crisis are socially determined through the information we consume from others. A social group offers protection, although it is also a space where false beliefs might propagate. We analyze how heuristics and cognitive biases make us more vulnerable to the misinformation we consume not only from our contacts but even from the commercial interests of the social media platforms themselves. Given that digital spaces have become the primary source of information for a significant proportion of humanity, the analysis of how part of our collective consciousness could be manipulated through fake news and misinformation, shared by social media, should be a matter of major concern. In this chapter, we critically examine the role of digital media - such as YouTube and Facebook - in the public construction of the concepts of climate change and global warming.