Who’s behind one of the major accounts promoting climate denialism on X?

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

In 2016, Jarrod Fidden, an Australian entrepreneur living in Ireland, announced that he’d launched a dating app for conspiracy theorists—or, as he put it at the time, for those who engage with “socially inconvenient truths.” The app was written up in dozens of news outlets in multiple languages as a funny curiosity. Fidden himself was described the same way: a jaunty, voluble character who liked to tell reporters how he and his wife had “woken up” together a few years before to the sinister, hidden hands shaping the world, generating the idea for the site.

While Awake Dating soon vanished from the headlines, the man behind the app seems to have moved on to more impactful pursuits. Less than a decade later, Wide Awake Media, a Twitter account that Fidden appears to operate, has become a major voice for climate denialism. Its more than 500,000 followers on X include former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone; Craig Kelly, a former member of Australian Parliament and an overt climate change denialist; former General Mike Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a QAnon promoter; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of early Covid lockdown measures and a professor of health policy at Stanford, whom Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health in his second term.

Wide Awake Media is a huge player in a small but exceedingly noisy echo chamber of climate denial accounts on X, which parrot each other’s paranoid assertions that climate change is a “hoax” and that green energy proposals are a pretext to impose global control. With the help of Twitter’s monetized verification system, Wide Awake has grown an exceedingly large audience, mostly on the right; Elon Musk himself recently replied to the account, further raising its visibility.

The fact that a single conspiracy entrepreneur has been able to gain such a large foothold in Twitter’s information ecosystem is concerning to experts who research climate denialism and its dissemination.

Jennie King is the director of climate research and policy for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that studies how extremism and disinformation spread online. “The Wide Awake story is indicative of various online trends,” she says, “including the diversity of actors who are piggybacking on the climate crisis as a way to generate both clout and revenue.”  

In its current form, Wide Awake Media began as a Telegram channel promoting primarily anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content before joining Twitter in 2022 and becoming more active after Musk’s purchase of the site. (The Telegram channel remains, but is less frequently updated.) At the same time, the account also shifted to focus largely on climate denialism.

The Twitter account is verified, meaning its operator pays for a subscription, and in return has its visibility and replies boosted by the site’s algorithm. A verified account also means Wide Awake Media can make money from popular content.

In 2023, the account saw a huge boom in traffic; between April and November of that year, King says, “they had gone from having 322 followers to 250,000 followers. This morning they’re at 577,000. So in the course of 18 months, that is a 1.7 thousand fold increase.”  

The account focuses on several themes, King says, that reliably drive grievance-based engagement, including perceived government overreach during early days of Covid and its tension with “individual liberties,” and “fundamental changes to infrastructure and our lived environment,” like proposals for so-called 15-minute cities.

“There was a diverse community of people with grievances around these themes,” she explains. “Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new, in this case climate action.”

The transition was especially pronounced in 2023, King says. At that time, with the worst days of Covid infections over, you couldn’t “generate the same engagement with pandemic-related content,” she explains. “So you need to expand the business model and think about how you’re going to maintain your relevance, visibility, traction, and profit drivers.”

Acting in a “mutually reinforcing” echo chamber with other online climate deniers is a huge part of Wide Awake’s strategy, King says. “It’s a tiny minority of accounts, probably less than 50 in the Anglosphere, who are really driving this ecosystem. They are constantly citing each other, appearing in each other’s channels, using each other to provide a veneer of credibility, and doing what disinfo needs to in order to survive: create the impression of critical mass.” 

Wide Awake Media also uses Twitter to promote an online store selling T-shirts with conspiratorial slogans—another way the operator has monetized their presence on the platform. (It also periodically promotes donations through fundraising platforms.) As Media Matters noted in a September 2023 analysis, the account’s “seemingly scrappy operation offering little original content besides t-shirts, proves that becoming a climate denial influencer is easier than ever.” 

A previous email for Fidden is no longer operational, and whoever is behind the Twitter account didn’t respond to several requests for comment—except to post a screenshot of one email I sent, warning that a “hit piece” was imminent. But there are strong indications Fidden is the person behind the Wide Awake Media Twitter account. For one, Wide Awake Media LLC was the name of the company he founded to promote Awake Dating. A previous website, wideawakemedia.ie, which advertised Awake Dating, began redirecting to an identical US-based site, wideawakemedia.us, in 2018. Both the Irish and US sites linked to the Wide Awake Media Twitter account as methods of contact. So does the vendor that sells Wide Awake Media’s T-shirts, suggesting one common operator behind the Irish site, the US site, and the T-shirt seller.

(The Twitter account has claimed to be a “one man operation” based in the UK, uses British spelling, and engages heavily with conspiracy theories about Australian politics, where Fidden is from, and local issues affecting the UK and Ireland.)

In the transition from conspiracist dating to climate denial, Fidden seems to have lost at least one ally. Daniel John Sullivan, a Seattle-based software engineer, was previously identified as Awake Dating’s CTO. On one of several blogs he maintains, Sullivan has called Fidden a “shit head” and “a grifter.” In a brief email exchange, Sullivan emphatically stated that he’s no longer involved with Fidden or any of his projects. 

Wide Awake Media could be viewed as what the Pew Research Center, in a recent report, called a “news influencer”—a poster with no journalism background or news outlet affiliation, that nonetheless helps shape how their audience reads and interprets current events.

Musk’s version of X has proved especially helpful for Wide Awake Media as it expands its audience and promotes paranoia, given that under him, the company has dismantled its trust and safety teams and fundamentally ceded the fight against disinformation. That can, King says, “create a culture of permissibility within a platform.” 

“People know they’re likely to be able to act with impunity,” she adds. By removing the safeguards, “You create an enabling environment where certain accounts are suddenly able to accumulate enormous followings overnight.” 

Of course, individual climate disinformation peddlers are always joined by the much more powerful industry lobbyists. At this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP29, oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered “the delegations of almost every country,” the Guardian reported. But responses to the climate denialism industry, and the individuals who spread it, are also starting to take shape. Brazil, the United Nations, and UNESCO recently announced a project to respond to climate disinformation. Their Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, the groups have said, “expand the scope and breadth of research into climate disinformation and its impacts.” (Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has also announced support for the move.)

Meanwhile, King says, climate disinformation is likely to continue to be a major area of focus for conspiracy peddlers, because of the grim reality that climate change and its harmful impacts are increasingly impossible to ignore. 

“Judging from what we know about the climate crisis, and how its effects are becoming more directly experienced by the general public, this topic is going to have a long shelf life,” she says.