Climate Change Denial: Facebook

URL	https://Persagen.com/docs/climate_change_denial-facebook.html	Climate Change Denial: Facebook Climate misinformation posts viewed up to 1.36m daily [image source].
Sources	Persagen.com \| other sources (cited in situ)
Authors	Persagen.com
Date published	2021-11-05
Curation date	2021-11-05
Curator	Dr. Victoria A. Stuart, Ph.D.
Modified
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Summary	With a dataset of 195 accounts and 48,700 posts, a report by Stop Funding Heat finds an average range of 818,000 to 1.36 million views of climate misinformation each day on Facebook. Just 3.6% of this content has been fact-checked. This report also finds that Facebook continues to directly receive thousands of dollars while placing climate misinformation on its advertising platform. This issue has an easy fix, was raised over a year ago, and nothing has been done.
Main articles	Anthropogenic Climate Change Climate Change Denial Facebook
Related	Facebook User Interaction With Borderline & Questionable Content
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Ontologies	Show

Contents

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Background

[📌 pinned report] [StopFundingHeat.info, 2021-11-03] #InDenial - Facebook's Growing Friendship With Climate Misinformation.

The Problem

Mark Zuckerberg is on record admitting that sensationalist content and misinformation on Facebook is good business. In 2021, the social media giant continues to be under fire from whistleblowers, the press, governments and advertisers on the spread of misinformation on the platform, opening up a wider debate on Facebook's impact on society. Facebook claims it is fighting a multitude of issues including hate speech, public health, elections and - lately - climate misinformation.

Stop Funding Heat's new report - In Denial - Facebook's Growing Friendship With Climate Misinformation [local copy] - using tools and expertise from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and CASM Technology, brings fresh evidence to the table, finding that climate misinformation is rampant on Facebook, while the platform directly receives thousands of dollars to place climate misinformation on its advertising platform.

Findings

An estimated range of 818,000 and 1.36 million daily views of climate misinformation on the platform, using a dataset of 195 Pages and Groups and 48,700 posts.
Up to 13.6 times more views of misinformation than Facebook claims to send to its Climate Science Center. Only 3.6% of the misinformation identified was fact-checked.
The number of reactions, comments and shares per post from Pages and Groups dedicated to climate misinformation increased 76.7% since the start of the year.
113 climate misinformation adverts on Facebook's Ad Library between January and October 2021. 78% of the estimated spend on these adverts came from 7 Pages that were already flagged one year ago in a previous report. Facebook is yet to act.

This is Stop Funding Heat's second report in six months covering Facebook's problems with climate misinformation. May 2021's "On The Back Burner" report explored over 150 academic studies, reports and journalistic articles that exposed loopholes in Facebook's misinformation policies and provided concrete examples demonstrating the extent of the problem.

Executive Summary

In this report, Stop Funding Heat brings fresh evidence to Facebook. With a dataset of 195 accounts and 48,700 posts, the report finds an average range of between 818,000 and 1.36 million views of climate misinformation every day. Just 3.6% of this content has been fact-checked. This report also finds that Facebook continues to directly receive thousands of dollars while placing climate misinformation on its advertising platform. This issue in particular has an easy fix, was raised over a year ago, and yet nothing has been done.

Part 1, "Introduction", provides context for this report, including background on definitions, on other relevant reports, and why Facebook needs to take swift action now before it is too late.

Part 2, "Climate Misinformation on Organic Content", presents findings from Stop Funding Heat's extensive dataset. The report uses the latest climate communication science to identify instances of climate misinformation and exposes a large discrepancy between what Facebook says and what the data says. With a limited, English-language only dataset, conservative estimates of views of climate misinformation are already 8.2x - 13.6x the amount that Facebook sends to its own Climate Science Center (referred to as the Climate Science Information Center until September 2021 | local copy, downloaded 2021-11-05). Furthermore, the data shows that interactions (comments, shares and reactions) on the worst climate misinformation posts have increased more than three quarters over 2021.

Part 2 also provides a large sample of the climate misinformation posts found throughout this research in order to demonstrate just how wide-reaching and multifaceted this problem truly is. It also makes the methodology - and the science behind it - transparent.

Part 3, "Climate Misinformation on the Advertising Platform", presents 113 climate misinformation adverts that Facebook have received money for in 2021. Seven of the Pages surfaced a year ago but have continued to advertise without intervention from Facebook. This represents a huge vulnerability ahead of COP26 - anyone could start a Facebook Page and start paying to spread lies about the climate overnight without intervention from the platform.

Part 4, "What Can Be Done?", covers what Facebook should do next. This part is very brief because the next steps, at their core, are very simple - (i) adopt a public definition of climate misinformation; (ii) enforce it; and (iii) be transparent about progress.

2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is the most important global climate summit yet - and the stakes on climate change are only going to get higher. Facebook has reacted too late too many times before - with Q-Anon, with Cambridge Analytica, with Covid-19, even with genocide. Facebook is late yet again, and its inaction continues to fuel the climate crisis.

The best time to act on this was years ago. The second best time is now.

The Solution

We are asking Facebook to show us, not tell us how much they care about climate misinformation with the following actions.

Adopt and publicise a definition of climate misinformation that follows the latest climate communication science.
Share its internal research on how climate misinformation spreads on the platform.
Confirm and properly enforce a total ban on climate misinformation in paid advertising on the platform.
Produce a transparent, public-facing plan to meaningfully reduce the spread of climate misinformation on the platform, including adding climate misinformation to community standards, a more transparent fact-checking process, debunking misinformation in real-time, and standards to de-platform deliberate repeat offenders.

StopFundingHeat is a climate change advocacy group campaigning against climate change denial, climate change misinformation, and climate change disinformation.

[📌 pinned report] [StopFundingHeat.info, 2021-05-12] Stop Funding Heat Calls on Facebook to Stop Spreading Climate Denial.

Stop Funding Heat today released a world-first report - "How Facebook's Inaction On Misinformation Fuels The Global Climate Crisis" [link | local copy] - summarising all the available evidence on Facebook's record on climate misinformation. The 40-page report, which references over 100 academic studies, empirical reports and journalistic investigations, found that:

Climate change denial is advertised on the platform without Facebook's detection.
Despite publicly aligning against climate change misinformation, Facebook has no policy on it.
Facebook's existing misinformation policies are poorly implemented - the Third-Party Fact-Checking Program [local copy, downloaded 2021-11-05] has failed to combat Covid-19 misinformation, anti-vaccination misinformation, electoral misinformation and more.
Facebook's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program checks only around six climate misinformation pieces a month.

[Full Fact (Jan-Jun 2019)] Report on the Facebook Third Party Fact Checking programme [local copy]. Full Fact is the U.K.'s independent fact checking charity.]

Facebook's latest solution, the Climate Science Information Center [local copy, downloaded 2021-11-05 | rebranded 2021-09 as: Climate Science Center], is unclear, fundamentally ineffective and not operating at the appropriate scale.

With 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow later this year, and adverse weather events more and more common, climate misinformation is set to rise in 2021. Facebook is not prepared. We have today [2021-05-12] launched a petition so everyone has an opportunity to tell Facebook what they think about their performance on climate misinformation.

StopFundingHeat is a climate change advocacy group campaigning against climate change denial, climate change misinformation, and climate change disinformation.

[Logically.ai, 2021-11-05] Facebook Failing To Catch Climate Misinformation, Research Finds. | Logically.ai is one of over 80 organizations to have partnered with Facebook as part of its third-party fact checking program and is a verified signatory of non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Facebook is lagging behind in its efforts to identify and remove climate change misinformation on its platform, campaigners have warned. As world leaders gather in Glasgow, Scotland for 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this week, a report published by the pressure group Stop Funding Heat on Thursday [2021-11-05] found that Facebook's recent commitments have not been sufficient in curbing climate misinformation on the site.

Researchers suggested that restrictive third-party fact checking rules and a lack of clarity on how to identify climate misinformation had led to swathes of misleading and false posts going unchecked.

Stop Funding Heat's report is the second to criticize Facebook's approach to climate misinformation this week. A separate study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) - The Toxic Ten: How Ten Fringe Publishers Fuel 69% of Digital Climate Change Denial | local copy - found that just 10 percent of misleading climate change denial posts were marked as misinformation.

In response to the CCDH report, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement that climate misinformation only accounted for a small percentage of posts on its site, and that "We continue to combat climate misinformation by reducing the distribution of anything rated false or misleading by one of our fact-checking partners."

Facebook has launched a number of environmentally friendly initiatives in recent weeks. These include its pledge to grant $1 million to groups finding ways to tackle climate misinformation, and an expansion of its Climate Science Center [in 2021-09, Facebook rebranded it's Climate Science Information Center (local copy, downloaded 2021-11-05) as the Climate Science Center].

However, the latest research from Stop Funding Heat suggests that a restrictive approach to the definition of climate change misinformation has led to false and misleading posts slipping through the net. Looking at 48,701 posts in the period of January to August 2021, just 3.6 percent of climate misinformation found had a fact checking label, with an additional 10.7 percent linking to Facebook's Climate Science Center.

Stop Funding Heat highlighted that Facebook frequently failed to flag posts from noted political and media personalities, which it identified as creating the most misinformation surrounding climate change organically. "There's a lot of misinformation out there from media outlets and their anchors, particularly in the U.S, which isn't being picked up on at all, and therefore isn't falling foul of any repeat offender policy," said Sean Buchan, a researcher at Stop Funding Heat, who authored the report.

As 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) pushes the need for drastic and swift changes to lower carbon emissions, climate change denial could pose a serious threat, Sean Buchan added. "That misinformation is subtle, but it can really change people's minds as to whether something like Biden's infrastructure plan is a good idea or not. That could really put a break on important policy, and could continue to get out of hand."

While this category of posts only accounted for four percent of climate misinformation identified in the category of "multi-issue climate denial" they received 67 percent of total interactions in the dataset.

Multi-issue climate change skeptics tend to focus on the economic costs of green policy or to cast doubt over the viability of reducing carbon emissions.

The findings align with a report from Logically.ai and APCO Worldwide, which found that top-down communications from politicians and media outlets were by far the biggest drivers of climate misinformation.

As it stands, politicians are exempt from Facebook's fact checking policies. A number of fact-checkers from the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) accredited organizations have previously called for Facebook to change its stance on fact checking politicians, which they said could remove a "climate of doubt" created by politicians known to espouse falsehoods.

Following Facebook's decision to uphold the ban on Donald Trump on the platform in May 2021, PolitiFact.com's executive director, Aaron Sharockman, said the board must also consider scrapping its policy on fact checking politicians.

As such, this led to zero percent of climate misinformation being fact checked by the political pages analyzed in Stop Funding Heat's report.

Posts on Facebook advocating for clearer forms of climate change denial also saw a steep increase in engagement this year.

Stop Funding Heat also tracked single-issue Facebook pages run by what the group describes as "dedicated climate denialists," regarded as those who publish the most obvious forms of climate misinformation. Pages such as "Friends of Science" and "Climate change is natural" argue that climate change is inevitable, and that policy and behavioral changes are attempts to control and monitor the population.

The group found that in January 2021, there were a total of 165,000 interactions with such posts. This rose to 226,000, 226,000, and 241,000 in June 2021, July 2021, and August 2021 respectively.

Significantly, this figure is higher than the number of visits to Facebook's Climate Science Center, which Facebook says stood at 100,000 visits a day in September 2021.

While Stop Funding Heat acknowledged that these posts only accounted for a small proportion of climate misinformation, they warned that the situation could become steadily worse without intervention. "Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying that content that tends to be controversial tends to be more shareable, and our feeling is that if you don't do anything about it, it could get worse. That increase to us gives an impression that this could be a canary in a coal mine," Stop Funding Heat researcher Sean Buchan said. Buchan called on Facebook to produce a clear explanation on how it categorizes climate misinformation alongside a plan of action on how to tackle the problem.

"Facebook tends to walk the walk, but they're not talking the talk. We have not been approached directly to tackle the issue. There does not appear to be an internal understanding of what counts as climate misinformation. In response to our last report [2021-05-12], Facebook said that climate misinformation appears to be a small part of misinformation generally. For journalists and campaigners, it would be helpful to have a public definition of what counts as climate misinformation"

[EcoWatch.com, 2021-11-04] People View Climate Misinformation on Facebook About a Million Times Daily, Study Finds.

A new report finds that views of climate misinformation posts on Facebook are reaching an average of 818,000 to 1.36 million views daily. This estimate is up to 13 times more than the number of views that legitimate posts in Facebook's own Climate Science Center receive.

The report, On The Back Burner, examines 48,700 posts by 196 accounts from January to August 2021. The results confirm what many people already knew or suspected - that Facebook is allowing misinformation to easily be digested, shared, and added to.

Stop Funding Heat, an organization behind the report (along with Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of activists), also found that Facebook isn't just a platform for misinformation. The social media giant also allows these misinformation red posts.

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