News article or big oil ad? As native advertisements mislead readers on climate change, Boston University experts identify interventions

(Press-News.org) In the battle against climate disinformation, native advertising is a fierce foe. A study published on March 4, 2025 in npj Climate Action led by Boston University (BU) researchers, in collaboration with Cambridge University colleagues, evaluates two promising tools to fight misleading native advertising campaigns put forth by big oil companies.

Many major news organizations now offer corporations the opportunity to pay for articles that mimic in tone and format the publication’s regular reported content. These ‘native advertisements’ are designed to camouflage seamlessly into their surroundings, containing only subtle disclosure messages often overlooked or misunderstood by readers. Fossil fuel companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to shape public perceptions of the climate crisis.

“Because these ads appear on reputable, trusted news platforms, and are formatted like reported pieces, they often come across to readers as genuine journalism,” said the study’s lead author Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of mass communication and director of the Communication Research Center at BU’s College of Communication. “Research has shown native ads are really effective at swaying readers’ opinions.”

The new study is the first to investigate how two mitigation strategies — disclosures and inoculations — may reduce climate misperceptions caused by exposure to native advertising from the fossil fuel industry. The authors found that when participants were shown a real native ad from ExxonMobil, disclosure messages helped them recognize advertising, while inoculations helped reduce their susceptibility to misleading claims.

“As fossil fuel companies invest in disguising their advertisements, this study furthers our understanding of how to help readers recognize when commercial content is masquerading as news and spreading climate misperceptions,” said study co-author Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of earth and environment in the BU College of Arts & Sciences and director of BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS).

Amazeen is also a core faculty member at IGS, which provided funding and support for this research in partnership with BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

The research builds on a growing body of work by Amazeen and colleagues at the College of Communication assessing how people recognize and respond to covert misinformation campaigns. By better understanding these processes, they hope that they can prevent misinformation before it takes root and changes people’s beliefs and actions on important issues like climate change.

‘The Future of Energy’ Ad

Starting in 2018, readers of The New York Times website encountered what appeared to be an article, titled “The Future of Energy,” describing efforts by oil and gas giant ExxonMobil to invest in algae-based biofuels. Because it appeared beneath the Times’ masthead, in the outlet’s typical formatting and font, many readers likely missed the small banner at the top of the page mentioning that it was an ad sponsored by ExxonMobil.

The ad, part of a $5-million-dollar campaign, neglected to mention the company’s staggering carbon footprint. It also omitted key context, The Intercept reported, like that the stated goal for algae-based biofuel production would represent only 0.2% of the company’s overall refinery capacity. In a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Massachusetts cited the ad as evidence of the company’s “false and misleading” communications, with several states pursuing similar cases.

Putting Two Promising Interventions to the Test

The BU-led research team examined how more than a thousand participants responded to “The Future of Energy” ad in a simulated social media feed.

Before viewing the ad, participants saw one, both, or neither of the following intervention messages:

An inoculation message designed to psychologically ‘inoculate’ readers from future influence by broadly warning them of potential exposures to misleading paid content. In this study, the inoculation message was a fictitious social media post from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminding people to be wary of online misinformation. A disclosure message with a simple line of text appearing on a post. In this study, the text “Paid Post by ExxonMobil” accompanied the piece. Studies have shown that more often than not, when native ads are shared on social media, this disclosure disappears. “Each of these two approaches can be beneficial in its own way, and each has shortcomings,” said study co-author Arunima Krishna, an associate professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations at the BU College of Communication and an associate director at IGS. “With this study, we got a clearer understanding of how each message type can work to counteract climate disinformation. We also studied how the two interventions can work together.”

Bolstering Psychological Resilience to Native Ads

The team found that the ad bolstered opinions on ExxonMobil’s sustainability across the study’s many participants, regardless of which messages they saw, but that the interventions helped to reduce this effect. Some of the key findings include:

The presence of a disclosure more than doubled the likelihood that a participant recognized the content as an ad. However, the participants who had seen a disclosure and those who had not were equally likely to agree with the statement “companies like ExxonMobil are investing heavily in becoming more environmentally friendly.” Inoculation messages were much more effective than disclosures at protecting people’s existing beliefs on climate change, decreasing the likelihood that participants would agree with misleading claims presented in the ad. “Disclosures helped people recognize advertising. However, they didn’t help them recognize that the material was biased and misleading,” Amazeen said. “Inoculation messaging provides general education that can be used to fill in that gap and help people resist its persuasive effects. Increasing general awareness about misinformation strategies used by self-interested actors, combined with clearer labels on sponsored content, will help people distinguish native ads from reported content.”

This study is part of the Boston University Climate Disinformation Initiative, interdisciplinary research on how climate lies spread, who they mislead, and how to stop them. It was jointly funded by the Institute for Global Sustainability and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

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