# Fifty Shades of Greenwashing: The Political Economy of Climate Change Advertising on Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14930 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14930/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01313/) (2024)
- [Stance Detection: A Practical Guide to Classifying Political Beliefs in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01723/) (2023)
- [The regulation of online political micro-targeting in Europe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02860/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we provide a novel measure for greenwashing -- i.e., climate-related misinformation -- that shows how polluting companies can use social media advertising related to climate change to redirect criticism. To do so, we identify greenwashing content in 11 million social-political ads in Meta's Ad Targeting Datset with a measurement technique that combines large language models, human coders, and advances in Bayesian item response theory. We show that what is called greenwashing has diverse actors and components, but we also identify a very pernicious form, which we call political greenwashing, that appears to be promoted by fossil fuel companies and related interest groups. Based on ad targeting data, we show that much of this advertising happens via organizations with undisclosed links to the fossil fuel industry. Furthermore, we show that greenwashing ad content is being micro-targeted at left-leaning communities with fossil fuel assets, though we also find comparatively little evidence of ad targeting aimed at influencing public opinion at the national level.