ESG

Opening — Why this matters now Everyone suddenly cares about sustainability. Corporations issue glossy ESG reports, regulators publish directives, and investors nod approvingly at any sentence containing net-zero. The problem, of course, is that words are cheap. Greenwashing—claims that sound environmentally responsible while being misleading, partial, or outright false—has quietly become one of the most corrosive forms of corporate misinformation. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is plausible. And plausibility is exactly where today’s large language models tend to fail. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Corporate sustainability is having a content crisis. Brands flood X (formerly Twitter) with green-themed posts, pledging allegiance to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while their real-world actions remain opaque. The question is no longer who is talking about sustainability—it’s what they are actually saying, and whether it means anything at all. A new study from the University of Amsterdam offers a data-driven lens on this problem. By combining large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), the researchers have built a multimodal pipeline that decodes the texture of corporate sustainability messaging across millions of social media posts. Their goal: to map not what companies claim, but how they construct the narrative of being sustainable. ...