Cyberstorm

Khatab Hammad and Code For Africa participated in this investigation.

Video clip of former US presidential candidate Kamala Harris calling for “a reduction in population to improve air quality.”

This clip was posted on social media platform X by an account named STOP Age.2030 with the username @1Kuwty. It framed the clip as part of a conspiracy to bring down birth rates in order to implement the climate agenda.

The account failed to mention that the White House had made clear that Harris had made a slip of the tongue, confusing the words “population” and “pollution”. The correct text talked about reducing pollution to improve air and water quality for children, with no mention of reducing population.

This account promotes several hashtags that deny climate change, including #climate_change_hoax, which plays a role in promoting conspiracy theories through the hashtag #Agenda_2030.

We analyzed interactions with a whole set of hashtags launched by this account and others, in collaboration with ARIJ and Code for Africa, and within the framework of the Disarming Disinformation project run by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).

Our analysis showed that accounts on the social media platform X, based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are running campaigns to cast doubt on climate change. We also found that some accounts belonging to people holding official positions in both countries were active in disinformation campaigns related to climate change. This runs counter to the official policies of these two countries, which have ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement, aimed at strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change.

As well as showing who is behind the promotion of these hashtags, our analysis also revealed a systematic effort to amplify engagement with them using networks that rely on automated and semi-automated accounts. The aim is to disseminate a false idea of public opinion and to make those hashtags that deny climate change the most prominent ones on Arabic social media.

Direct hashtags such as #خدعة_التغير_المناخي (#climate_change_hoax) #كذبة_المناخ (#climate_lie) and #خدعة_المناخ (climate_hoax) have seen significant engagement. The first of these hashtags appeared in 2018, and has been posted over 6.987 million times. Engagement fluctuated, reaching the greatest number of posts – 132 – on January 8, 2024, followed by 221 posts between October 10-12, 2024, most of which were from Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

The hashtag ‘#كذبة_المناخ’ (#climate_lie) appeared in 578 posts and gained over 2.112 million hits, with peaks occurring throughout the year, most notably on September 10 and 11, 2024. The majority of posts – 371 - were from accounts with no identified location. But of those posts made from known geographical locations, most were from Kuwait, followed by Italy, and Saudi Arabia. The hashtag #خدعة_المناخ (#climate_hoax) appeared in seven posts and had over 40,000 views, with the most interaction in Kuwait.

We noticed that the percentage of original content in these hashtags was low - no more than six percent – indicating that most of the engagement was in the form of reposts, quotes, and replies.

Posts casting doubt on climate change have also trended on other hashtags, most notably #أجندة_2030 (#agenda_2030) which has promoted conspiracy theories on several issues related to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development - most notably coronavirus and vaccines - as well as climate change denial.

We analysed 20,000 posts with the hashtag #أجندة_2030 (#agenda_2030) between March-December 2024. These posts reached more than 58 million users, with a notable peak in the months of May, June, and October. In the case of posts coming from a known geographical location, Kuwait was the country with the most engagement with this hashtag, followed by Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

Analysis of hashtag data showed that digital activity peaked on certain days or in specific months, reflecting a possible link between these times and climate-related events.

May, June, September, and October 2024 stood out as the most active months for the hashtags we analyzed.

Monitoring the number of posts connected with the hashtags showed that September 7 had the highest daily activity, with 321 posts.

This was followed by May 19, with 304 posts and May 6 with 281 posts. Posts between late May and mid-June 2024 coincided with the Bonn Climate Change Conference, which included meetings of the subsidiary bodies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This period also coincided with World Environment Day on June 5. Preparatory meetings for the conference were held between May 27 and June 2, and the formal session took place from June 3 to 13, 2024.

High numbers of postings were also seen at other times, including October 11-22. October 2024 saw World Space Week, which takes place between the of October 4-10 every year. In 2024, the event focused on space and climate change. Arab Environment Day also falls on October 14 each year.

This heightened interaction during October also coincided with the release of the 2024 Emissions Gap Report from the United Nations Environment Programme on the 24 October,, which warned that the world was entering a critical phase of the climate crisis.

Disinformation Causes Peak in Hashtag Activity

These peaks in activity involved the circulation of widely shared disinformation. The most notable example was the account @AHshamsah, which posted an image of two weather maps, shown in a German TV programme, using the hashtag #كذبة_المناخ (#climate_lie). One of these maps showed temperatures on a day in June 2022 across large parts of Germany in dark red. Five years earlier the same TV program showed another weather map coloured green, even though the temperatures at that time were higher than on the later map. Social media users shared the two images as evidence supporting their theory of a “climate hoax” and to deny climate change was occurring.

The maps are from the German TV program “Tagesthemen”, which is broadcast daily on Das Erste channel. The difference in the appearance of the two weather maps is actually explained by a change in the company providing the weather forecasts. The one that produced the green weather map in 2017 was called Cumulus, but it stopped providing weather services to Tagesthemen in 2020. Since then, Hessischer Rundfunk has taken over responsibility for producing the weather forecast for Das Erste channel.

In an email to TjekDet, Hessischer Rundfunk explained that it also used red on its weather maps in 2017 when temperatures were high, including in its other news program Tagesschau, also broadcast on Das Erste. It pointed out that this program should not be confused with Tagesthemen, despite the similarity in names.

Since Hessischer Rundfunk began producing bulletins for Tagesthemen in 2020, it has standardized its designs to match those already used in Tagesschau. According to the company, it uses strong colors so viewers can visualise temperatures across the country, including rural areas where temperatures are not shown in figures.

By contrast, Cumulus - the company that previously produced weather forecasts broadcast in the Tagesthemen program - always used white text on a green background, whether the weather was warm during June, cold during March, or even when temperatures were below zero, in January.

In September 2024, @AHshamsah, the main account interacting with the hashtag #كذبة_المناخ (#climate_lie) endorsed a claim that "there are plans to install cameras at all entrances and exits to public areas (to calculate your carbon footprint based on your car's mileage) and inside organizations (to calculate your carbon footprint linked to goods) and to stop you travelling or buying more if you go above the permitted limit. Otherwise your bank account will be blocked.” This claim was accompanied by a screen image of a news story from Kuwait headed: "Interior Ministry tells Social Affairs: security cameras should be paid for by Cooperative Projects”.

Further investigation revealed that this image had no connection to carbon footprints or climate change, as claimed. Rather, it was from a news story published on August 7, 2023 about a directive from the Kuwaiti deputy interior minister to his counterpart in the Ministry of Social Affairs, requesting that the National Cooperative Projects Committee bear the cost of installing surveillance cameras in residential areas.

This measure was designed to make it easier for security agencies to monitor and apprehend wanted individuals as they entered or left these areas.

The plethora of disinformation is one of the most serious impediments to tackling the climate crisis, according to the UN Development Programme's Climate Promise initiative. This programme argues that the dissemination of climate-related misinformation is intended to confuse the public and undermine environmental policies.

According to the European Union's understanding of “climate disinformation,” campaigns of deliberate disinformation as well as simple misinformation are undermining international efforts to address climate change, hindering the implementation of relevant policies, and obstructing international cooperation on climate change.

Oil-Producing Countries Behind the Interaction

Analysis showed that hashtag posts generally lacked information on geographical location. This may be an indication that the activity on these hashtags is automated.

But when there was data showing geographical location, it indicated that posting of these hashtags was most common in certain oil-producing countries. Kuwait topped the list of most active countries, with 1,688 posts across various hashtags and over 5.238 million views. Next came Saudi Arabia with 556 posts and over 700,000 views, followed by Iraq, with 554 posts and more than 660,000 views.

The fact that these three oil-producing countries topped the list of interactions with these hashtags led us to investigate how dependent their economies are on oil. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq are among the countries whose economies are most heavily dependent on oil, making climate and energy transition issues a particularly sensitive subject in their internal public discourse.

In Saudi Arabia, the oil sector accounted for about 31 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023, down from 40 percent in 2022. Despite this drop, oil revenues still made up the largest share of public revenues in 2024 - around 60 percent, according to the Ministry of Finance. Oil revenues amounted to 756.6 billion riyals (about $200 billion), compared to 502.5 billion riyals (about $134 billion) for non-oil revenues.

In Kuwait, the economy continues to rely heavily on the oil sector, which contributed 43.4 percent of GDP in 2024. This shows that economic diversification has been weak, despite repeated government plans to promote it.

The highest rates of oil dependence are in Iraq, where it accounted for 91 percent of federal budget revenues between December 2024 and March 2025. In July 2022, the World Bank ranked Iraq among the most oil-dependent countries in the world, noting that oil revenues had accounted for 99 percent of the country's exports, 85 percent of the government budget, and 42 percent of GDP over the past decade.

Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) told ARIJ that climate sceptics have succeeded in spreading doubts about the effectiveness of climate policies and in attacking any agency that implements measures to combat climate change. On the other hand, lack of information has been a bigger problem in the global south. CAAD also said that misinformation was being exploited to undermine climate action, possibly because economies reliant on fossil fuels were in their final stages and authoritarianism may be the best way to continue keeping such economies profitable.

Top Accounts on Hashtags

Our analysis of hashtags showed that the most interaction with each hashtag we looked at was mostly from a number of accounts held by official and public figures.

Data from Botometer X, a website that analyzes automated activity, indicates that these most interactive accounts tend to be human ones (with the exception of @saaraapkuwait, which is semi-automated in terms of its pattern of posts and its username).

This is one of the characteristics of campaigns, where human accounts drive engagement, while automated accounts amplify that engagement.

The first account, STOP Age.2030, based in Kuwait, is the most prominent in the network of accounts interacting with these hashtags. It promotes climate conspiracy theories and opposes the UN’s Agenda 2030. It is at the heart of the network promoting the hashtag #خدعة_التغير_المناخي (#climate_change_hoax).

The second most prominent of the network of accounts interacting with the hashtags is @hanadialhamadi. Based in Kuwait, its owner promotes the same narrative as @1kuwty.

Similarly, @saaraapkuwait also adopts a narrative of conspiracy theories, something it states explicitly in its profile. This account is also based in Kuwait.

The final account on the list of those most interactive on various hashtags is @ahshamsah. It is the most interactive with the hashtag #كذبة_المناخ (#climate_lie), where the previously mentioned disinformation was posted. Although the account lists its location as the Italian city of Turin, its interactions show a particular focus on Kuwaiti affairs. This account, alongside @hanadialhamadi, has the most interactions with the hashtag #كذبة_المناخ (climate_lie), and follows the narrative promoted by the @1kuwty account.

2030 Agenda

Data analysis revealed that the account @1kuwty was the most important and influential axis in the campaign to promote this hashtag. It acted as the “main node” in a network of accounts that interacted intensively with it.

This network map shows a centralised structure appearing as circles centred around the @1kuwty account. The core nodes closest to the account – grey, black, orange and blue circles – represent the most active accounts. The outer layers - particularly the purple one - represent the edges of the network of accounts, which interacted less or accessed content at a later state. The map, therefore, shows a gradual expansion of influence.

The Climate Change Hoax

As with the hashtag #أجندة_2030 (#Agenda_2030), @1kuwty plays a pivotal role as the most influential account in the network. The interaction map below shows a recurring pattern that is almost identical in structure, with the network highly concentrated around this same account, which reflects a coordinated pattern that reproduces itself across different hashtags.

Climate Hoax

The @ahshamsah account stands out as a pivotal hub in the hashtag-related network, serving as the primary node for hashtag-related interactions. An orange edge extending from it toward the @hanadialhamadi account indicates a strong level of interaction between the two.

Despite the limited number of connections linking @hanadialhamadi to the rest of the network, this account acts as a secondary hub in hashtag-related discussions.

Accounts Amplifying the Campaign Narrative

By analyzing the automated nature of some accounts, such as excessive activity, similarity of content similarity and retweeting from the central account, we identified 20 accounts whose frequency of posting indicates that they are not human.

The fact that these accounts repost the same content from a single central account, @1Kuwty, reinforces the hypothesis that these accounts constitute a kind of “propaganda swarm” designed to amplify messages and enforce them digitally through repetition and intensive dissemination.

Analysis of the semantic similarity of the discourse on hashtags identified five most frequently occurring narrative clusters. The most prominent was #اجندة_2030 (#Agenda 2030) and #الوعي_الجمعي (#collective_awareness), which appeared in 234 posts. Hashtags such as #رسالة_اليوم (#message_of_the_day), #الوعي_الجمعي (#collective_awareness) and #اجندة_2030 (#Agenda 2030) are used frequently. Their content focuses on warnings that the UN Agenda 2030 is a mechanism for imposing social control policies, with an emphasis on collective awareness and the need to stand up to what is portrayed as outside diktats.

The other narrative group is "Anti-Climate Change Hoax," which was observed in 51 posts. It categorically denies the existence of climate change or questions the motives of those raising it as an issue, with content that describes "climate change" as a hoax driven by energy companies or political actors. It uses keywords such as "climate_change_hoax," "conspiracy," and "hoax."

The similarity between content across the hashtags points to attempts at imposing a specific narrative that rejects both the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and, more fundamentally, the whole fight against climate change.

Public Figures

An analysis of the hashtag #خدعة_التغير_المناخي (#climate_change_hoax) indicates that its fourth most influential user, in terms of the reach of his tweets, is the Kuwaiti minister of housing and former member of the National Assembly, Shuaib Al-Muwaizri, who shared a post from the Kuwait-based STOP Age.2030 account. This post garnered more than 70,000 views in 2024.

Outside the scope of this hashtag, former member of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Economic Council Mohammed Al-Sabban has also promoted claims of so-called “climate lies". Al-Sabban served as Saudi Arabia's chief negotiator at UN conferences on climate change and was a prominent economic advisor to the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources. He led the Saudi delegation at several conferences, such as the 2009 Copenhagen Conference.

Al-Sabban consistently denied the role of human activity in climate change. He has 77,800 followers on X as of the date of publication of this report.

Al-Sabban posted on X on April 29, 2023: "Climate change is a natural cycle that has nothing to do with human activity, contrary to what the West tries to make out – for economic purposes - that the cause of the latest climate cycle is fossil fuels, singling out oil. And there are still people who believe what they say, because their scientists cooked all this up and got vast amounts of money!!!?"

The UN ranks the claim that “climate change is not linked to human activity” at the top of its list of climate myths. It points out that burning fossil fuels creates a blanket of pollution that traps the sun's heat on Earth and raises global temperatures, and that global warming leads in turn to other changes, such as drought, water scarcity, severe fires, sea level rise, floods, melting of polar ice, violent storms, and loss of biodiversity.

Former Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Fahad Al-Mansouri responded to Al-Sabban’s posts, saying: “Confirming what you said, dear doctor, it is countries that are jealous of the Kingdom, its development and status as one of the world's largest oil producers, which use this phrase at climate change conferences.”

The participation of officials from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in promoting misleading information related to climate change contradicts the official positions of both countries, which have ratified the Paris Agreement.

CAAD points out that the strategy behind most disinformation campaigns is to disrupt any political action to address the climate crisis. As such, political parties linked to fossil fuel interests, whether through campaign financing or reliance on fossil fuel revenues for their national budgets, often, if not always, use disinformation as a tool to justify the continued exploitation of fossil fuels, despite their direct cause of climate change.

We contacted the public figures mentioned in this report for comment. But, as of the date of publication, we have received no response.

This investigation was produced with support from the International Center for Journalists’ (ICFJ) Disarming Disinformation program, a three-year international programmex financed by the Scripps Howard Foundation.