Facebook failing to tackle climate misinformation, report claims

Facebook is sytematically failing to address the rise of climate-related misinformation on its platform, according to a new report published by the campaign group Stop Funding Heat.

The 40-page study, called On the Back Burner: How Facebook’s Inaction on Misinformation Fuels the Global Climate Crisis, claims Facebook has failed to prevent the spread of climate-related misinformation. These claims include:

● Facebook has no public climate misinformation policy

● Climate denial is advertised on the platform without Facebook’s detection

● Facebook’s solutions fail to match the scale of misinformation on the platform.

● Only 6 climate misinformation pieces are detected by Facebook’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program every month

● Climate misinformation is set to rise in 2021, the year of COP26

"Facebook is taking money on many occasions for content that is out and out climate denial," said Sean Buchan, the lead writer of the report and former director of Bristol-based marketing agency If Not Now Digital.

"This is how their entire business model works: they take money from advertisers to put in between what we call organic posts on the platform."

According to the report, Facebook has so far failed to define climate misinformation, or seek to address the problem, in any of its public policies. There is no mention of climate misinformation in Facebook’s Community Standards, Advertising Standards, and no misinformation-related policies exist, the report claims.

Unlike anti-vaccination content, climate misinformation is currently not defined as harmful content by the platform, while climate change is absent from Facebook’s Oversight Board and its charter.

The report claims that organisations publishing climate misinformation receive cheap reach on Facebook’s advertising platform and use false data to undermine climate policies and denigrate climate scientists.

Sean continued: “There is no way of looking at the evidence without concluding that Facebook have this issue squarely on the back burner. Despite the clear threat of climate inaction, the world’s largest social media platform continues to profit from lies, denial and false solutions about climate change. This is Facebook playing the fiddle while the planet burns. The company needs to demonstrate alignment with their public statements on the climate, and take the threat to COP26 seriously”.

The report also claims Facebook’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFCP) has failed to prevent the spread of misinformation on a variety of topics. From publicly available records, the report finds just six climate fact-checks per month, compared to the 4.75bn items shared by Facebook users each day.

Finally, the report points to what it claims is the inadequacy of Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center (CSIC). Touted as a key solution to combat climate misinformation, CSIC has been rolled out in only 16 countries across the world and fails to use best practice to debunk myths.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report for 2021 warned that “climate action failure” is the most impactful and second most likely long-term risk faced by humanity.

The Stop Funding Heat report makes a number of recommendations for the platform to better prevent the spread of misinformation from impacting the outcomes of the COP26 climate conference taking place in Glasgow later this year. These are:

● To update its misinformation policies to explicitly include climate misinformation

● Stop profiting from climate misinformation by removing all climate denial on the advertising platform

● Be transparent: regularly share how misinformation spreads on the platform and report about the effectiveness of measures taken to prevent the spread

● Take effective action against the biggest repeat offenders; and close other loopholes that the report exposes, such as exempting politicians from climate fact-checks.

Read the full report at stopfundingheat.info