Facebook is failing to to do “the bare minimum” to stop the spread of misinformation around climate change, according to a new report.
New analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate says half the articles posted to the platform by titles which it says publish the most popular climate change-denying content did not carry a warning or fact-checking label.
The top ten, or ‘Toxic Ten’, publishers which it said account for 69% of user engagements on climate denial content were: RT, Breitbart, Patriot Post, The Daily Wire, The Federalist Papers, The Washington Times, Newsmax, The Western Journal, Townhall Media and Media Research Centre.
The new study examined 184 different high-engagement posts containing “dangerous climate misinformation” from those publishers and found that 93 were left unlabelled by Facebook.
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The posts included in the sample had seen high levels of engagement, collectively accruing more than one million likes, comments or shares on the site. The 93 articles that had been left unlabelled by Facebook accounted for 541,877, or 53%, of those total interactions.
The articles being promoted on Facebook with no cautionary label included the following:
- This Breitbart comment piece claiming global warming was a hoax
- This Washington Times comment piece which said climate change was “just another excuse for the government to take even more control of our lives and impart only those liberties the government, in its beneficence, allows us to have”.
In May 2021, Facebook said it would begin labelling posts about climate change to direct users away from potential disinformation and towards the platform’s new “Climate Science Information Center”, in an effort to clamp down on climate change denial on its site.
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But all of the posts included in the new study came after that date.
A previous study into the ‘Toxic Ten’ publishers found eight of the organisations had made $5.3m in Google ad revenue during six months of 2020. More than $1m of that figure was accounted for by Breitbart.
Chief executive at the Center for Countering Digital Hate Imran Ahmed said: “By failing to do even the bare minimum to address the spread of climate denial information, Meta is exacerbating the climate crisis. Climate change denial — designed to fracture our resolve and impede meaningful action to mitigate climate change — flows unabated on Facebook and Instagram.
“Meta keeps claiming it cares about climate change but they have failed to stop the spread of misinformation about climate change on their platform; they have failed even to consistently apply measures that they themselves admit are of limited efficacy, such as labelling.
“The price of Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to deal with his platforms’ pollution of the information ecosystem is catastrophic damage to our physical ecosystem.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “We combat climate change misinformation by connecting people to reliable information in many languages from leading organizations through our Climate Science Center and working with a global network of independent fact checkers to review and rate content.
“When they rate this content as false, we add a warning label and reduce its distribution so fewer people see it. During the timeframe of this report, we hadn’t completely rolled out our labelling program, which very likely impacted the results.”
The news comes as UK publishers become increasingly confident that Downing Street will propose Australia-style legislation forcing Meta and Google to pay for news. If Britain follows the pattern of Australia, the threat of legislation could lead to UK publishers being paid around £200m a year by the two tech giants.
Image: Reuters/Stephen Lam
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