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Institutions of higher education (IHEs) have great collective capacity to address major societal challenges. This was apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, as academic institutions in the United States and across the globe quickly mobilized to protect their students and staff, help develop and administer vaccines and diagnostic tests, and provide trusted information to caregivers, the public and government decision-makers. The strains that Earth's rapidly changing climate places on the economy, the environment, and society call for an even greater exercise of this capacity (Leal Filho et al. 2023, Lippel et al. 2024). Such calls are not new. In 2006, the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) encouraged IHEs to “model ways to minimize global warming emissions” and “provid[e] the knowledge and the educated graduates to achieve climate neutrality.” Nearly 20 years later, many IHEs are broadly engaged in deepening climate knowledge and preparing students to develop and implement climate solutions. Academic researchers are developing innovative low-carbon technologies and improved methods to build climate resilience. Many of the 284 signatories to the ACUPCC are decarbonizing their campuses and participating in the dramatic, market-driven transformation of global energy systems. IHEs across the nation are working with partners in the public, private, and social sectors to disseminate climate knowledge and solutions. But the escalating scale and pace of the climate challenge, with extreme heat, floods, droughts, and fires battering campuses and communities, call for a more robust and better coordinated response. 

Disinformation activities that aim to manipulate public opinion pose serious challenges to managing online platforms. One of the most widely used disinformation techniques is bot-assisted fake social engagement, which is used to falsely and quickly amplify the salience of information at scale. Based on agenda-setting theory, we hypothesize that bot-assisted fake social engagement boosts public attention in the manner intended by the manipulator. Leveraging a proven case of bot-assisted fake social engagement operation in a highly trafficked news portal, this study examines the impact of fake social engagement on the digital public’s news consumption, search activities, and political sentiment. For that purpose, we used ground-truth labels of the manipulator’s bot accounts, as well as real-time clickstream logs generated by ordinary public users. Results show that bot-assisted fake social engagement operations disproportionately increase the digital public’s attention to not only the topical domain of the manipulator’s interest (i.e., political news) but also to specific attributes of the topic (i.e., political keywords and sentiment) that align with the manipulator’s intention. We discuss managerial and policy implications for increasingly cluttered online platforms.