CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed at London Climate Action Week

On June 26th, our CEO Imran Ahmed laid out the threats to collective action on climate change posed by social media to a packed Goals House at London Climate Action Week, on a panel hosted by Freuds and BBC Media Action. Ahmed cited CCDH’s “New Climate Denial” report, which showed that climate deniers changed strategy to further undermine the climate movement, science and solutions, delaying climate action.

“We are all here today because we still believe that the truth matters.  We know that lies delay action. And action delayed is justice denied — to people, to planet, to future generations. This isn’t about ideology. It’s about shared truth, shared responsibility, and shared survival. Everyone in this room has a role — whether you write policy, write code, fund change, or shape the public conversation. Let’s lead — not just on emissions, but on information. Because without truth, we can’t act. And without action, we lose everything.”

Read Imran Ahmed’s full speech:

“Good afternoon. 

It’s a privilege to join you here today at Goals House — where good people and open minds gather to tackle our biggest challenges. 

And let’s be honest… 

There’s no problem bigger – or more urgent – than climate change. 

I founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate after a moment of loss, both personal and for our nation. 

In 2016, my colleague Jo Cox – a 41-year-old mother of two and the MP for Batley & Spen – was murdered by a man radicalised – in part – online. 

That moment shattered my naïve view of social media as just a space for cat memes and holiday snaps. 

I realised: 

These platforms had become the arena where our values were negotiated, 

our facts contested, 

our collective reality reshaped – sometimes in ways that put people at real-world risk. 

And that bad actors had led on finding ways to weaponize those spaces to their advantage. 

I believed initially I could persuade platforms to act when they saw the ways bad actors were weaponizing the maths of their platforms to distort reality and cause real-world harm. 

But over time, it became clear: the systems on social media platforms that seek to increase engagement and time spent on platform by selecting content for amplification had a systemic negative externality of amplifying harm – hate and lies that drive rage, counter-speech and polarization. 

This wasn’t about malice per se. 

An economist would say it was about misaligned incentives generating negative externalities. 

Me, I read politics. My old professors would observe it is an example of what has happened again and again throughout history when any locus of power lacks checks and balances, transparency or meaningful accountability. 

So I founded CCDH to do what platforms and lawmakers could and would not: 

Speak truth to power, in defence of truth, science, and democracy. 

Not long after we launched in September 2019, messages started coming from all corners: 

Mental health advocates 

Public health workers 

Democracy advocates 

And climate campaigners. 

They all said the same thing: 

“We can’t solve our problem if people no longer agree on reality.” 

In response, over the past three years we have deployed researchers, data scientists, and investigators to understand how climate denial has proliferated and evolved online, and how deniers have weaponized and dominated digital spaces. 

Our AI-powered study, The New Denial, ingested thousands of videos by climate deniers, using a customized LLM to study the types of claims made over the past five years. 

When we crunched the data, we found a chilling new fact – climate denial has evolved online. 

The plurality of climate denial content is no longer “climate change isn’t real or man-made.” 

In 2025, most  climate denial is what we dubbed The New Denial: 

Undermining solutions by casting shade on their cost or effectiveness 

Attacking climate science and scientists 

And claiming climate change is actually a positive thing. 

The new denialism is faster, more seductive, built for the internet by cynical opponents of progress whose methods have evolved even as their lies and greed remain intact. 

You see what they absolutely know is that in today’s digital ecosystem, what wins is not truth, but engagement. 

Not science, but bullshit. 

Algorithms reward engagement – even people clamouring to oppose lies – as signals for amplification. 

It doesn’t matter what harm we study. 

The same advantaging of lies, the more insane and controversial the better, over truth. 

And let me be clear – even the platforms’ own internal data tells us the same thing. 

What does this mean at scale? 

If lies are skating downhill with an algorithmic tailwind while the truth is roller-skating uphill? 

Bad actors can overwhelm our reality with lies and chaos. 

As Steve Bannon once put it: “Flood the zone with shit.” 

As people struggle to tell what’s real from what’s manufactured, and they see lies more frequently than the truth, is it any wonder they start to doubt the old certainties? 

That’s not a strategy of persuasion — it’s a strategy of saturation. 

In our latest report, yet to be released, we analysed 300 disinformation posts posted while wildfires, hurricanes, and floods raged — across YouTube, Meta, and X. 

Real crises where accurate information can mean the difference between danger and safety. 

We found 221 million views of false or misleading content. 

Most of it came from verified accounts. 

Many of them were monetised. 

And the platforms? 

X had Community Notes on just 1% of posts. 

Meta had fact-checks on only 2%. 

YouTube? Not a single direct debunk. 

Worse — YouTube actively recommended more denial content after each video. 

Consider this: 

During the LA wildfires, the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones’, posts received 408 million views. 

That’s more than all ten major news outlets and ten emergency response agencies combined. 

This isn’t fringe content. 

It’s the algorithm at work. 

And it’s not just misleading… 

It’s dangerous: 

Aid delayed. 

First responders threatened. 

Lives put at risk. 

Earlier this year, at the Climate Information Integrity Summit in Brasília – I made the case that this digital climate disinformation is accelerating global risk and deepening inequality globally. 

If you live in the Global South, you’re likely to suffer first and worst from climate breakdown — and from the pollution of truth. 

That’s why information integrity must now be seen as a frontline climate issue at this year’s COP 30. 

I do want to address one criticism of our work. 

Some say that seeking to stop the advantaging of disinformation on digital platforms is a threat to liberty, even that it stifles free speech. 

Let me address this briefly but directly. 

James Madison, the Founding Father of the United States who authored the First Amendment to the Constitution, warned: 

“Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.” 

And that is exactly what we’re witnessing now. 

The abuse of liberty — via industrial-scale disinformation that is advantaged over the truth — is endangering not just public trust, but public safety. 

The US Constitution is not a species-wide suicide pact. 

When greed puts at risk our species’ future, we have the right at the very least to demand transparency and for tough questions to be asked. 

And let me be clear, our research, our advocacy, our criticism, counter-speech is not censorship. 

I am not a representative of Government. 

My ability as a citizen, a human, to speak truth to powerful institutions is precisely what Madison sought to enable and celebrate through the First Amendment. 

So, what do we do? 

At CCDH, we advocate a path forward through our STAR Framework: 

Safety by Design happens when we have: 

Transparency – Open the black box of algorithms and moderation. 

Accountability –  We need to be able to ask platforms tough questions and get honest answers, and finally 

Responsibility – Companies must own the outcomes of their design choices. 

Let me be clear: 

There are people inside platforms, governments, and civil society working hard to get this right. 

And that matters. 

But the scale of the challenge demands systemic reform, not isolated efforts. 

We are all here today because we still believe that the truth matters.  

We know that lies delay action. 

And action delayed is justice denied — 

to people, to planet, to future generations. 

This isn’t about ideology. 

It’s about shared truth, shared responsibility, and shared survival. 

Everyone in this room has a role — 

whether you write policy, write code, fund change, or shape the public conversation. 

Let’s lead — not just on emissions, but on information. 

Because without truth, we can’t act. 

And without action, we lose everything. 

Thank you.”