Last week, we mentioned that Heartland was working hard to pull off a big climate debate in Times Square as part of its decades-long mission to protect their fossil fuel industry funders. We were going to follow up with another piece about how it went, but...well, we couldn’t find a single piece of coverage about it. It appears as though not even Heartland’s fellow fossil-fueled propaganda outlets like the Dailys Caller or Signal bothered to make mention of the event.
Of course, this event was less a debate and more a panel of deniers responding to various statements from their critics. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if the average Boomer’s Facebook feed came to life, this would be it.
That brings us to the actual topic of the day: Facebook. It’s been three years since the platform was exploited by a hostile foreign power to interfere with the 2016 election, and in that time the company has made little to no progress in preventing the same thing from happening again.
This week, Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter reported that a rabidly pro-Trump, “I Love America” network of Facebook pages with over a million fans and more engagement than USA Today’s Facebook page was actually being run out of the Ukraine. After the story was published, Facebook removed the pages, and Legum ran an interview with the person behind it. Turns out the page wasn’t a concerted government conspiracy, but instead some guy who wanted to make a buck, with help from just two other people, one of whom was his 13-year-old daughter. Turns out, Trump fans are easy marks for foreign-borne propaganda. (Shocker!)
Unfortunately, people using Facebook to generate traffic and then earn income from Google ads are, at this point, one of the lesser worries. It’s much more concerning that the platform is being used by political forces as a tool to, say, incite a genocide in Myanmar.
And Facebook appears reluctant, at best, to do something about political abuse. For example, it recently announced that politicians will be free from fact-checks or other content rules, meaning it is quite literally allowing politicians to use their site as a platform for propaganda and hate speech, under the guise of “newsworthiness.” (YouTube followed suit.)
Of course it’s not just politicians using Facebook to spread misinformation--our fossil fuel funded deniers are all about it, too. Remember when they were working the refs on the issue, crying “censorship” to the point that Facebook was turning to some of the least-fact-y right wing outlets for fact checking?
And remember the other week when we talked about ClimateFeedback’s searing fact-check of a “highly misleading” CO2 Coalition op-ed?
Well, it’s all come together. The Daily Caller “reports” that Facebook initially flagged a post with the op-ed as misleading, per the ClimateFeedback debunking, but then removed the label after the authors complained about Climate Feedback being an “alarmist advocacy group.”
What good is a fact check if it can get overturned by the very people deliberately spreading misinformation? What good is a content policy about hate speech if it’s not going to apply to the politicians who have the power to turn that hate into policy? What good is a social media network whose supposed goal is bringing people together if it lets itself be exploited by those who would, quite literally, erect walls to keep people apart?
We don’t expect answers, but it sure would be nice to know how Mark Zuckerberg and others would respond to these questions. And of course it would be nice if Facebook actually addressed the issues on its platform instead of simply trying to save face(book).
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