Characterizing AI Manipulation Risks in Brazilian YouTube Climate Discourse
It addresses risks of AI manipulation in climate communication for policymakers and researchers, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new context.
This study analyzed climate discourse on Brazilian YouTube to identify psychological traits driving engagement and their potential for informing persuasive synthetic campaigns using generative language models, while also releasing a dataset of 226K videos and 2.7M comments with annotations.
Climate change poses a global threat to public health, food security, and economic stability. Addressing it requires evidence-based policies and a nuanced understanding of how the threat is perceived by the public, particularly within visual social media, where narratives quickly evolve through voices of individuals, politicians, NGOs, and institutions. This study investigates climate-related discourse on YouTube within the Brazilian context, a geopolitically significant nation in global environmental negotiations. Through three case studies, we examine (1) which psychological content traits most effectively drive audience engagement, (2) the extent to which these traits influence content popularity, and (3) whether such insights can inform the design of persuasive synthetic campaigns--such as climate denialism--using recent generative language models. Another contribution of this work is the release of a large publicly available dataset of 226K Brazilian YouTube videos and 2.7M user comments on climate change. The dataset includes fine-grained annotations of persuasive strategies, theory-of-mind categorizations in user responses, and typologies of content creators. This resource can help support future research on digital climate communication and the ethical risk of algorithmically amplified narratives and generative media.