What Would a Climate-Conscious Facebook Look Like?

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. After a summer of devastating hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires, Facebook’s new measures to address climate misinformation leave something to be desired. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking they were a joke. In a blog post headlined “Tackling Climate Change Together,” Facebook said it would be adding quizzes to its climate information center and donating $1 million to organizations that fight climate misinformation, among other measures. Those pledges, activists and disinformation experts say, are piddling compared to the amount of climate misinformation and paid pro-fossil fuel advertising on the site. In 2020 alone, U.S. oil companies spent nearly $10 million on Facebook ads promoting the continued use of fossil fuels, according to an August report from Influence Map, a nonprofit watchdog group. Another report, from nonprofit Friends of the Earth, showed how faulty narratives around renewables spread far and wide on social media sites like Facebook following the Texas blackouts in February. “The initiatives that [Facebook] took are far too little, far too late,” says Michael Khoo, Friends of the Earth’s disinformation spokesperson. “It’s missing the big picture problem.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] There are smart, reasonable people wo...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news