On Monday, Kate Petersen published a great fact check at USA Today, debunking the inaccurate science and shoddy math that Aussie denier Alan Jones used to assert that climate policy would be “national economic suicide” for Australia.
In a May Instagram video, Jones stated, "How much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere? It's 0.04%. And of that 0.04%, human beings around the world create 3%. And of that 3%, Australia creates 1.3%. So, for the 1.3% of the 3% of the 0.04%, we then decide to have a national economic suicide." As it turns out, this claim is completely misleading because the total amount of CO2 is more important than the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. Not only that, but Jones is also completely wrong about the numbers: "Humans have contributed about 33% of that [carbon dioxide in the air], not 3%, since 1850," Peterson explained. Jones has his figure wrong by 30%, but we're not holding our breath that he self-corrects.
Asserting that a policy will be too costly is a staple of anti-regulatory propaganda, and it’s the sort of thing that industry advocates have leveled against everything from climate action to seat belts to (as Oreskes and Conway mention in The Big Myth) child labor laws a century ago. Given this long history, you would think it would be easy enough for Big Tech platforms to guard against these crusty old lies!
Instead, tech companies defer to journalists and fact checkers, which is good, but then pile an infinite amount of work on them instead of reducing the amount of harmful disinformation posted in the first place. Alan Jones is hardly an unknown figure and his role in the disinformation ecosystem as a driver of viral climate denial is well-documented, so a platform that actually cared about accuracy and quality of information could easily throttle his climate content in order to protect users from harmful false content.
The Monday USA Today fact check was not even the first time Jones has been corrected on this very point! Back in 2012, he got in trouble with the Australian Communications and Media Authority for claiming humans are only responsible for "0.001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," and when asked to provide evidence of the claim, Jones's employer at the time "conceded that it was a claim researched by Mr Jones himself and they weren't able to adduce any evidence supporting that claim."
Jones has been saying basically the same thing for a decade (though admittedly moving from a totally made-up figure to one that's wrong by a mere order of magnitude), but Facebook and Instagram aren't going to proactively do anything to protect their users. Instead, they'll hide behind fact checkers, and make them constantly do the same thing over and over again.
As Petersen's USA Today fact check notes, "The claim was also debunked by AFP" in May by Roland Lloyd Parry, who also debunked similar claims this April. After doing so last year as well. ClimateFeedback has also debunked various forms of this falsehood, meaning that Facebook/Instagram-recognized fact checkers have addressed versions of this false claim at least six times.
Each debunk requires multiple hours of work for the fact checker to examine claims, follow up with those making them, read existing literature to get context, talk to experts to get quotes, get another fact checker to fact check the fact check, and so on.
On the other hand, Jones and fellow clout-chasing disinfluencers who spread these false claims on social media clearly spend zero time on being accurate. And instead of creating a policy that would make fact checkers' jobs easier by reducing the amount of false content that can get algorithmically boosted to virality, Meta has instead just shifted the burden of moderating Facebook and Instagram onto the journalists whose industry has been gutted by social media.
All the while, liars get to go viral, leaving fact checkers to chase down the truth.