According to a new report published today analyzing Big Tech’s approach to climate disinformation, “social media companies are largely leaving the public in the dark about their efforts to combat the problem. There is a gross lack of transparency, as these companies conceal much of the data about the prevalence of digital climate dis/misinformation and any internal measures taken to address its spread.”
The report, from Avaaz, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, found that Pinterest’s recent move to ban climate misinformation puts it, along with YouTube/Google’s demonetization of climate lies, at the top of the pack. But it’s not an impressive group, as none earned more than 14 of the 27 possible points for policy measures.
None of the companies provide any decent degree of transparency like regular reports that document the extent of the problem and efficacy of their solutions, so it’s impossible to believe any of their claims to be successful in keeping the fossil fuel industry’s false advertising machine from exploiting their platform to serve propaganda to their users.
In a statement to press, Rebecca Lenn at Avaaz said that “it’s time for Big Tech to answer the years-long call from researchers, advocates, and lawmakers for full transparency on the scale of climate disinformation online and their policies to combat it. If they won’t, then lawmakers need to step up and mandate transparency and accountability from tech platforms – not just to clean up our feeds, but to help end the climate crisis.”
Charlie Cray of Greenpeace added that the report “expands on what the IPCC identified in its latest report – the pernicious spread of climate disinformation across social media is a key reason for the delay in the transition to the clean energy economy that we need for a livable future.”
And indeed, there’s plenty of spread, and Big Tech is barely bothered — judging by how little they’re doing. Facebook, for example, is hiding behind its deference to fact checkers, essentially tasking a handful of journalists to moderate the billion-dollar platform’s infinite, algorithm-boosted scroll of climate-denying, election-stealing disinformation so that its climate-denying election-stealing leadership can’t get in the way of efforts to reduce such harmful content that’s tarnishing the brand so badly they tried to change their name to Meta to escape it.
While TikTok does have some misinfo policies and repeat offender consequences, it doesn’t specify anything about climate, so it only got 7 points (compared to Facebook’s 9 and Pinterest and YouTube’s tie at 14.)
Coming in a pitiful last place is Twitter, with just 5 of a possible 27 points. Twitter completely lacks transparency on enforcement of what vague disinfo policies they do have, none of it addresses climate, and they haven’t even acknowledged the issue formally in their policies at all.
But good-hearted Silicon Valley denizens can rest assured that solutions are presented. The Climate Disinformation Coalition, which includes the report authors, has a set of policy prescriptions for Big Tech.
Here’s how the report describes them, though we changed the order in which they’re listed, so now the first letter of each makes this the Disinfo DARE:
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Disclose weekly reports on the scale and prevalence of climate change dis/ misinformation on the platform and mitigation efforts taken internally.
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Adopt privacy and data protection policies to protect individuals and communities who may be climate dis/misinformation targets.
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Release in full the company’s current labeling, fact-checking, policy review, and algorithmic ranking systems related to climate change disinformation policies.
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Establish, disclose, and enforce policies to reduce climate change dis/ misinformation.
So, here’s a message to Silicon Valley employees who might be mad that we’re being so mean to social media companies: Do better on climate disinfo- we DARE you!