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New Massive Attack-led campaign aims to expose corporate “greenwashing” during COP26

The new campaign follows the band’s recent report on carbon emissions in the live music sector.

Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja is leading a new campaign aimed at exposing climate change disinformation and corporate “greenwashing” on social media during COP26.

The Eco-Bot.Net project is a collaboration between Del Naja, Bill Posters and green industrialist Dale Vince (who conceived the project). Together, they’ve teamed up with lawyers, journalists and technologists, among others, to expose the “sheer scale and volume” of the practise – which is the process of misleading or misrepresenting a company’s products as environmentally sound – at social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

As part of the project, Posters, Vince and Posters will share “comprehensive” data drops on each day of the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. The first data drop, shared on Monday (1 November), contained thousands of alleged “greenwashing” sponsored adverts and content from Facebook and Instagram which the trio claim were “created by the world’s top 100 private and state-owned corporations that are responsible for over 70 per cent of all historic and current global greenhouse gas emissions”.

Speaking on the project in a statement, Del Naja said: “The general public are very much aware of the harm caused by the disinformation that is propagated via social media platforms. This project aims to show that Facebook in particular is responsible for most of the climate disinfo in current circulation and will also reveal the dimensions of the greenwash industrial complex – and the profits it generates for the platforms”.

Continuing, he added: “The cultural and live music sectors have been historically used by major transnational polluters (fast food/airlines/automotive) as public arenas to do their dirty laundry. As artists we have spent decades attempting to persuade promoters and venues to remove unethical, polluting identities and sponsors from live music events. This is the cultural sector’s opportunity to return the favour via this public service intervention”.

The new project follows Massive Attack’s recently released report on carbon emissions in the live music sector. The report, entitled Roapmap to Super Low Carbon Live Music, was commissioned by the band and created by Manchester University’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. It was backed by Thom Yorke, with the Radiohead frontman tweeting: “Thank you to Massive Attack for doing this.. it has been clear for a while that the live music industry like so many others, has to start thinking differently fast, and to do so we need infrastructure support and planning from our Governments..where is it?” [sic]

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