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Spanish Environment Minister Falsely Accused Of Climate Hypocrisy In Viral Storm Of Misinformation [1]

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Date: 2023-07-13

Mis- and disinformers across multiple social media platforms, news outlets, and languages are wrongly accusing Spanish Ecological Transition Minister Teresa Ribera of hypocritically using a private jet to travel to a European Union (EU) environmental summit. However, it turns out that not only did she not fly on a private jet — she didn’t fly on a jet at all!

Earlier this week, the EU’s environment ministers held an informal meeting in Valladolid, Spain, to discuss environmental challenges such as ocean plastic pollution and climate change. The event was chaired by Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, Spain’s Minister for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, who is commonly known as Teresa Ribera . Ribera arrived at the conference riding an electric bicycle from the public bike sharing service Biki, and she tweeted praise for mayors who have supported pedestrian spaces, bikes, and public transportation in their cities.

Far-right Spanish politician Juan García-Gallardo soon wrongly accused Ribera of arriving at the summit in a Falcon government plane, and it wasn’t long before social media was abuzz with the viral yet false claim that Ribera had flown into Valladolid on a private jet before performatively riding a bicycle for a short distance as a publicity stunt. Twitter users posted this false assertion in multiple languages, including Spanish , English , and Portuguese , and many of these tweets received millions of views , with one such post being viewed over 15 million times . Climate disinformers like alleged former Holocaust denier Peter Imanuelsen and notable individuals such as ousted UK politician Andrew Bridgen and MMA fighter Conor McGregor also weighed in, pushing the incorrect claims out to an even wider audience. Numerous TikTok accounts also spread this misinformation , as did Facebook , Reddit , and even Mastodon users.

Disinformation outlets such as The Daily Wire , Sean Hannity’s website , and ZeroHedge further disseminated the false assertions about the private jet. Even Indian media outlets like Times Now News and OpIndia spread the misinformation, demonstrating the global virality of this incident. The Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller amplified a false tweet and criticized Ribera’s use of a limousine and vehicle escorts, but both the Caller and Sky News Australia mustered just enough journalistic integrity to admit that Ribera did not in fact fly on a plane. It seems that most Spanish-language media outlets did not fall for the misinformation about Ribera’s nonexistent plane flight, but Libre Mercado did amplify English-language tweets that wrongly mentioned the private jet.

In response, the Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita debunked the misinformation in both English and Spanish and confirmed that Ribera was already in Valladolid at the time the plane she was accused of riding landed in the city. However, while Ribera’s delegation took the train, she herself rode a hybrid vehicle to the conference.

The Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge publicly denied that Ribera flew on a plane to the meeting. Furthermore, Ribera herself stated that in five years, she has only used the Falcon plane five or six times and asserted that she can’t question the presence of her security escorts.

As we have previously explained , it is certainly reasonable to discourage those in power from using private planes, which emit disproportionate amounts of greenhouse gases. However, right-wing disinformers frequently point fingers at world leaders and environmental activists who fly on private jets in order to undermine climate policies and frame climate action as something that only benefits the elites, despite the fact that the climate crisis is already deeply harming the working class .

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/13/2180926/-Spanish-Environment-Minister-Falsely-Accused-Of-Climate-Hypocrisy-In-Viral-Storm-Of-Misinformation

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