CISS Native Ads

The Fossil Fuel Native Advertising Observatory project supports the development of an automated, research-driven system for analyzing how fossil fuel companies use native advertising to shape public narratives around climate and energy. During Fall 2025, the team focused on evaluating and extending a claims-based classification model for identifying rhetorical strategies and misinformation-related themes in fossil fuel–sponsored native advertisements. The system was tested on a growing corpus of sponsored articles collected from major news outlets and labeled using a custom claim taxonomy. By the end of the semester, the team validated the claims-based approach against both sentence-level and article-level annotations, demonstrating that this method captured nuanced messaging patterns that prior CARDS-based approaches failed to identify, particularly around false solutions such as carbon capture and petrochemical framing. For more notes on key findings from the previous semester please refer to the “Key Findings from Fall 2025” section. This semester the team will contribute to the development of CLAIMS 2.0, an expansion of the original CLAIMS model that is more claims based and less reliant on keywords. The goal is to use an ‘open-coding’ approach to typology development using a set of ‘seed claims’ about green technologies (such as CCS and renewable energy) and fossil fuels (such as oil and gas), to arrive at an exhaustive set of claims made about these fuels/technologies in native ads. The results will contribute to the larger CLAIMS 2.0 model which detects claims about a range of green technologies and fossil fuel products. Future teams should validate outputs against hand-labeled examples and clearly communicate model limitations alongside results.