Data traceability and interpretational limits in comparing child maltreatment forms and depression.

News consumption is shifting to social media platforms, with 54% of US adults and 38% of UK adults accessing the news through these platforms (). Concurrently, 47% of people globally, 39% in the United Kingdom and 35% in the United States encounter climate change news weekly (), which can prioritize disaster-focused impacts or the direness of the climate situation over opportunity-based reporting (). This can include ‘climate doom’, extreme portrayals of climate change used to emphasize the threat of global warming. However, climate doom could be strategically used to delay action by convincing people that there is nothing they can do, leading to disengagement and climate inaction (, ) or be perceived as emotionally manipulative, undermining the integrity of climate communication (). Despite extensive research on fear appeals and message persuasiveness (see ref. ), few studies examine the perceived manipulativeness of such messaging. Existing research suggests that people prefer climate messages without negative emotions (), that stronger terminology such as “climate emergency” reduces news credibility () and that overemphasizing the threat of climate change increases reactance and reduces pro-climate intentions among Republicans (). Although there are calls to counter climate doomism (, ), no research has examined whether psychological inoculation, i.e., preemptively forewarning people of manipulation and exposing them to weakened dose (examples) of misinformation techniques alongside refutations (), helps to build resistance against climate doom. Given its emerging effectiveness in other contexts (), inoculation may improve individuals’ ability to distinguish climate doom from nonmanipulative climate content, hereafter referred to as “standard” climate content. Further, given the potential adverse effects of doom content, improved discernment of climate doom may buffer the relationship between perceived manipulation and lower behavioral intentions. Moreover, most research in this domain has investigated the impact of climate messages in artificial survey settings unrepresentative of the social media experience. Here we leverage a validated social media feed simulation which collects behavioral engagement data (). Understanding how inoculation affects online engagement with climate content is important given the prevalence of social media news consumption (). Whether inoculation increases engagement as individuals spend more time evaluating manipulative content or decreases engagement due to the dismissal of such content is an open question (–).