Jair Bolsonaro in 2020. Marcos Corrêa via Flickr

As president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro not only weakened environmental regulations and gutted agencies charged with protecting the Amazon, he also railed against conservation. An analysis of his tweets and those of his ministers finds a link between their rhetoric and the acres of forest lost.

The study looked at thousands of tweets from Bolsonaro and his ministers of agriculture, environment, and foreign affairs from 2019, their first year in office. It identified 38 posts which signaled that illicit deforesters faced little risk of reprisal from the government.

Comparing these posts against a database of Amazon deforestation, the study found that forest clearing surged in the months when Bolsonaro and his ministers inveighed against conservation on Twitter. In 2019 alone, it estimates, such tweets were linked with the destruction of as many as 420,000 acres of rainforest.…