It’s easy to see that there’s a problem with disinformation on Facebook. But a newly revealed internal memo from a former Facebook data scientist reveals the depth of the problem, compounded by the fact that it is met with a surface-level response from management that takes months to act on obviously bad behavior.
In her departing letter to coworkers reported by Buzzfeed, Sophie Zhang wrote that “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” because “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry,” in places like Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
And of course, this is true in the US, where COVID and climate myths are going, well, viral and spreading like, well, wildfire. On both fronts, Facebook is taking basically the same response: set up new centers for information on COVID and climate, but otherwise take a relatively hands-off approach and do little to prevent disinformation from being shared.
In their announcement yesterday, Facebook rolled out a Climate Science Information Center, which, to give credit where it’s due, appears to be a perfectly respectable, IPCC-sourced source for science. But as basically everyone pointed out in response, this does nothing to prevent bad actors from using Facebook to spread self-serving propaganda.
People who want the facts on climate change can find them pretty easily. That’s not really the problem. The problem is that there is a whole cottage industry dedicated to telling the public that actually climate change isn’t a problem. (Hi, Connecticut lawsuit against Big Oil!)
And unfortunately, that industry has an audience that trusts it, which is putting their own lives at risk. That’s the bottom line of a recent study in Science Advances, that finds that “Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton Voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes.”
They point to deniers like Rush Limbaugh claiming that liberals/environmentalists are overhyping the storm, and warn that “the rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts -- and the resulting divide in self-protective measures -- illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism.”
So while Rush’s radio platform hardly needs Facebook to spread, the fact remains that similar denial-peddling, conservative punditry, often backed by fossil fuel interests, proliferates on the platform. And it means Facebook is going to need to do more than just adding a disclaimer that climate change is real if it wants to keep its users safe.