Climate activists hold placards as they protest outside Google offices during the tenth day of … [+]
Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, continues to host content from prominent anti-science climate change deniers despite claims that it would stop doing so, according to an investigation by non-profit activist group Avaaz. At the same time, search giant Google ran ads on 50 climate denial articles since the date it declared it would prohibit ads on such content, according to the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
From April to November this year, Avaaz found that Facebook ran 136 posts from organizations with ties to the fossil fuel industry, including rightwing blogs PragerU and Turning Point USA, accumulating more than 61 million estimated views. In spite of policies designed to flag misleading or false claims, 88% of the posts went unlabelled by Facebook’s fact checkers.
In a separate investigation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) discovered that Google ads were present on articles containing climate denial or misinformation from November 8 this year, despite a promise from the firm that it would stop ads on climate denial content from November 9, while the COP26 climate summit was ongoing. One Breitbart article bearing Google advertising described COP26 as “a gigantic eco-fascist gaslighting operation.”
Claims made in the articles ranged from stating outright that climate change is a “hoax,” to insisting that the effects of climate change will not be harmful, to assertions that climate change could even save lives.
“Climate change denial is a cynical strategy that seeks to delay the action needed to prevent ecological disaster,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH. “In making their initial announcement, Google appears to recognise that they have played a part in making climate change denial a profitable business, and yet they have not followed through with real action.”
“Despite repeated assurances from Facebook that it is addressing the spread of climate misinformation on its platform,” Avaaz said, “ … Facebook allowed top climate misinformers to skirt its policies and spread false and misleading information on climate change to millions of users unchecked.”
Avaaz also found that groups had paid to promote climate misinformation via Facebook’s ad platform, with PragerU spending $56,900 on 90 ads that were seen by users nearly 7 million times between January 1, 2020 and November 12, 2021.
The findings emerged last week around the same time that a European survey, from consulting firm Kantar Public, revealed that 57% of citizens across 11 nations had come into contact with misleading information about climate change. In the survey of more than 11,600 people, respondents said most of the climate misinformation they’d encountered—also 57%—was on social media sites. Kantar also found that 40% of climate misinformation was encountered in private conversation, suggesting that simply fact checking climate-related content online might not be enough to stem the tide of misleading claims.
In the Avaaz investigation, the researchers looked at Facebook posts from five known climate “misinformers”: the organizations PragerU and Turning Point USA; American conservative pundit John Stossel; Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg; and Australian television personality Alan Jones.
CCDH, meanwhile, singled out the organizations Brietbart, Electroverse, Western Journal, Hot Air and Newsbusters for articles containing claims that climate change is not real, and that climate science equates to “alarmism.” The five are all included on CCDH’s “toxic ten” list of “fringe publishers” that regularly post climate misinformation online.
Avaaz compared claims made in the Facebook posts to fact checks made by Facebook’s own fact-checking partners, as well as information from scientific bodies including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA. Climate Feedback, one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners, then looked at all the content flagged by Avaaz to evaluate them according to the network’s Scientific Credibility rating. The 136 posts that were found to contain climate misinformation were then ranked according to their estimated number of views.
PragerU came out on top, with 61 posts containing climate misinformation reaching 24.2 million views. Turning Point USA came second, with just five of its posts achieving a total of 10.9 million views. Both sites are funded by organizations that are directly tied to the fossil fuel industry: fracking billionaires the Wilks family have provided millions in funding to PragerU, while Turning Point USA is supported by numerous fossil fuel-aligned groups including the Heritage Foundation.
In September, former Fox News anchor John Stossel, who came third on Avaaz’s list of climate misinformers, sued Facebook for defamation after the site flagged some of his videos, from which he claims to earn up to $10,000 a month, for being “partly false” and “missing context.” Facebook has said the suit, which is on going, is “without merit.”
Bjorn Lomborg, who is not a climate scientist, appears regularly in the media to make false claims about climate science. One analysis of a Lomborg article from Climate Feedback found the author regularly resorts to the practice of “paltering.” As the site explains: “A successful palterer will try to avoid being untruthful in each of his/her utterances, but will nonetheless put together a highly misleading picture based on selective reporting, half-truths, and errors of omission.”
Among the Facebook ads determined to be misleading was one from PragerU about power failures in Texas early in 2021. The ad made the claim that widespread installation of renewable energy generation in Texas was behind the blackouts. State energy officials had already conceded that the outages were caused mainly by a lack of output from fossil fuel-powered facilities and nuclear power plants.
Screenshot of a Facebook ad, paid for by Turning Point USA, claiming that “climate change is a … [+]
The Kantar survey of European countries suggests climate misinformation of the sort described by Avaaz and CCDH is not a trivial matter, with social media acting as a conduit for misleading and false claims to make their way into daily conversation. Kantar found that more than a quarter of all respondents across 11 countries—on average, 27%—are ambivalent about the causes of climate change, believing it is “about equally caused by natural processes and human activity.”
Laurence Vardaxoglou, a doctoral researcher for Kantar Public and the Paris School of Economics, pointed out that this sort of ambivalence is one of the desired outcomes of targeted misinformation. “Urgent attention must be paid to the quarter of citizens who are ambivalent about the causes of climate change,” Vardaxoglou said. “Disorientated by the climate debate, they are particularly vulnerable to disinformation that aims to reduce public support for co-ordinated action on climate change. It is extremely important, then, that people have access to information on the topic that they know they can trust.”
Avaaz offered a set of policy recommendations that Facebook could choose to enact to tighten up on its misinformation problem. These included accepting “a robust definition of climate misinformation, as defined by climate and anti-misinformation experts”; retroactively correcting climate misinformation, “by ensuring all users targeted with such content receive a correction when the content is flagged by independent fact-checkers”; and sharing internal research on the spread of climate misinformation with journalists and lawmakers.
Facebook and Google are not the only platforms to have problems with climate misinformation. Earlier this month, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, Michael E. Mann, called on the Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube to remove climate misinformation from its site.
Twitter is also struggling with the problem. Last week I contacted the company to ask why I and other users following the “Science” topic had been presented with several posts by climate deniers. In response, a Twitter spokesperson wrote:
“We continue to improve our ability to filter topics for relevance and quality. We’ve implemented a number of protections to help keep conversations included in a topic healthy and free from abuse—including working to not recommend tweets for a topic if the engagement is manipulated or spammy.”
The spokesperson did not say why climate misinformation is being highlighted under Twitter’s Science topic. But the statement went on:
“We introduced a climate change topic to make it easier for people to find credible climate change information on Twitter. And, we continue to elevate climate change information through Twitter Moments to help bring people more context. We curated a Twitter Moment on the 2021 White House Climate Summit, for example. During COP26, we rolled out pre-bunks—hubs of credible, authoritative information, made available in the Explore tab, Search, and Trends. These pre-bunks surfaced reliable, factual context across a range of key themes, like the science backing climate change and global warming realities.”
Data demonstrating the effectiveness of these tactics was not made available. But one thing is clear: in spite of their assurances, the tech giants are not, at present, winning the battle against those with a vested interest in denying and delaying climate action.
Click here to view the Avaaz report, go here for the investigation from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and go here for the Kantar Public study.
