Researchers from NetLab UFRJ present research on greenwashing at USP congress

Researchers from NetLab UFRJ, Marina Loureiro and Julia Dias, took part in the 14th Regional AISV/IAVS Congress, held between February 9 and 11, 2026, at the University of São Paulo (USP) in São Paulo. The event brought together international researchers and specialists to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches in the field of semiotics, with a focus on multimodal and transmedia contexts.

The researchers took part in Panel 6 – Intersemiotic translation of illustrative images: Confronting expert human and artificial intelligence-generated descriptions of climate change images and visual artworks in multimodal transmedia settings, and presented the paper “The Aesthetics of Green Disinformation: mapping the visual grammar of greenwashing in LinkedIn ads”. The study analyzed visual strategies used by companies to legitimize deceptive sustainability narratives in the context of the energy transition.

The research combined multimodal methods, such as visual clustering with artificial intelligence support and automatic generation of image descriptions, articulated with critical human interpretation. From analysing 2,800 advertisements, the research identified that 1,476 (52.7%) showed evidence of greenwashing, and these were published by 389 (42.5%) companies.

In addition, the results revealed recurring patterns that make up a visual grammar of green capitalism.