Facebook’s response to the frequent and well-deserved criticism that it’s a cesspool of climate disinformation (among other degradations) has been to point to its supposed deference to fact checkers,and rating the posts they assess, and its Climate Science Center, a page of accurate information that it touts is getting a hundred thousand views a day.
While all that may sound impressive, and is quite nice and better than nothing, it unfortunately is rendered irrelevant by the fact that more than ten times as many people are exposed to climate disinformation on Facebook, every single day.
A new report from StopFundingHeat tracked 48,700 Facebook posts from nearly 200 accounts between January and August of 2021, and found that on any given day, climate disinformation gets somewhere between 818,000 and 1.36 million views. That's over 13 times more than Facebook directs to its climate science information center.
And the fact checking? Only 3.6% of the tracked posts were fact checked, so even by Facebook’s own standards, which deflect the burden of responsibility for protecting its users onto journalists, it’s failing.
Going deeper, the report looked at some pages and groups that were focused entirely on climate disinformation, and found that they’re growing, with the average interaction per post increasing by 76.7%. And the content from these single-issue pages rack up between 119,000 and 197,000 views a day. Facebook wants you to think its climate science center is fixing its climate denial problems, but scrappy shitposters are driving more traffic. (Sounds like Facebook's trademark attorneys aren't the only ones who need to up their game.)
But the real problem, in terms of views, are the rightwing media and political pages. Posts from outlets like Fox News and Breitbart accounted for only 4% of the total of the content tracked, but that subset of accounts drove an outsized 67% of the estimated total interactions with climate denial content.
This content, from “news and media personalities,” is likely exempted from fact checking by Facebook’s many loopholes, as only 1.4% of this content was labeled. And politicians? Never fact checked at all.
But hey, maybe you think that this is fine, and Facebook should be able to enjoy a reputation as a climate champ based on their many grand pronouncements. After all, it’s not like they’re profiting off of pollution or disinformation, right?
Wrong!
The report documents how Facebook got paid to run over a hundred climate misinformation advertisements between January 1 and October 17, 2021, driving 11.7 to 14.1 million views to content with messages like “climate change is a hoax.”
A handful of accounts pay Facebook to deceive users, as 56 of the 113 ads and 78% of the ad revenue came from just 7 accounts, which an August report from InfluenceMap alerted Facebook to. The biggest spender, by far? PragerU, which made up 70% of the ad spend and 61% of the estimated climate denial views.
“The majority of the problem is fixable in a few hours,” the report says, “but it remains ignored by Facebook.”
That’s why they’re launching a petition calling on the company to publicly define what it considers to be deceptive climate misinformation, to be transparent about the research it’s done internally on the problem, and then to make a plan to actually address the fact that people are using Facebook to mislead the public about a problem that imperils the entire planet.
And, of course, “bring in a total ban on climate misinformation in paid advertising on your platform.”