Disinformation on climate change runs on Facebook, precisely in the hours when the best energies of the planet are concentrated at COP26 in Glasgow to develop a strategy to combat the impending environmental catastrophe. Recent studies by independent social network monitoring organizations indicate that, despite the huge financial efforts made by Facebook (or rather Meta, the new umbrella company just announced by Mark Zuckerberg), hundreds of pages, groups, posts containing false information, conspiracy theories, denial of the climate emergency find undisturbed space on the platform.
“My name is Frances Haugen, I know what Facebook did”: the whistleblower’s testimony at the US Congress
According to a research by the non-profit environmental organization “Stop Funding Heat”, together with the Real Facebook Oversight Board (a group born in antagonism with the Oversight Board created by Facebook last year), from the analysis of over 195 between pages and groups on Facebook have emerged at least 818.000 post in which the emergence of climate change was denied, minimized or contextualized with false and misleading arguments. The level of interaction with these posts is high: at least 1.36 million views per day.
These are posts that are sometimes banal and elementary in their packaging, grotesque in the images (faces of environmental leaders such as Greta Thunberg e Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), with concise messages that ridicule and trivialize the alarms on global warming, the rise in the level of the oceans, the waves of devastating fires.
The ‘lie’ of Facebook
The dataset used in the research is limited to English-language content, and analysts formulate the hypothesis that the volume of disinformation present on the platform is far greater (8-13% more) than what Facebook itself admits and of which it is committed to ensuring fact-checking through its Climate Science Center.
Misleading advertising
Disinformation is also profitable, if Facebook has agreed to post more 100 advertisements containing unscientific statements about the climate, including the claim that “climate change is a hoax”. THE revenues from these advertisements, the study calculates, are between 58 thousand and 75 thousand dollars and the contents have been viewed over 10 million times.
Between denial and conspiracy
If the scale of the damage is large, the origin of the misinformation – at least in the English language – seems to be concentrated in a few subjects. A dozens of online publications, at the head of all the US far right site Breitbart, would be responsible for publishing the 70% fake content about climate change, according to another recent study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Many of these sites are the same sites that started campaigns for denial and conspiracy on Covid19 and vaccines. This demonstrates that there is a union of political and economic interests, with international ramifications, behind the coordinated and systematic dissemination of scientific misinformation.
Facebook responds to criticism by challenging the method in its opinion not very rigorous of these researches, the reliability and relevance of the data and therefore the conclusions that are drawn from it. Too bad that in recent weeks, with the Facebook Papers derived from the statements of the former employee “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, the ease with which Meta / Facebook treats data and its own internal research is clearly emerging, certainly more accurate and in some cases more devastating than those that any analyst outside the company could ever produce: ignoring or belittling them.
“Facebook cannot and does not intend to regulate itself,” accuses the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “We need concrete, independent, transparent monitoring from the outside, and to regulate and investigate all Facebook activities, including the dangerous spread of climate disinformation.”
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