The scale of climate misinformation on Facebook is “staggering” and “increasing quite substantially”, a new analysis of hundreds of thousands of posts has found. A report released on Thursday by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent watchdog group, and environmental nonprofit Stop Funding Heat, analyzed a dataset of more than 195 Facebook pages and groups. Researchers found an estimated 818,000 posts downplaying or denying the climate crisis, which have received a combined 1.36m views every day. The study’s release coincides with the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow and it urges governments to seriously consider the role of climate misinformation on social media in derailing the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.“This is where the ambitions of Cop26 and the revelations of the Facebook Papers collide, with our data showing Facebook is among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation,” researchers said. The study analyzed 195 pages known to distribute misinformation about the climate crisis using Facebook’s analytics tool, CrowdTangle. Of those, 41 were considered “single issue” groups. With names like “Climate Change is Natural”, “Climate Change is Crap” and “Climate Realism”, these groups primarily shared memes denying climate change exists and deriding politicians attempting to address it through legislation. Those that were not “single issue” groups included pages from figures like the rightwing politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, which posted misleading articles and disinformation about the climate crisis. This “rampant” spread of climate misinformation is getting substantially worse, said Sean Buchan, the researcher and partnerships manager for Stop Funding Heat. Interactions per post in its dataset have increased 76.7% in the past year, the report found.“If it continues to increase at this rate, this can cause significant harm in the real world,” he said. A spokesman for Facebook took issue with the methodology of the study, suggesting not all posts flagged in the report represented disinformation.“We’re focused on reducing actual climate misinformation on our platform, which is why we partner with a global network of factcheckers and reduce the distribution of anything they rate as false or misleading and reject any ads that have been debunked,” he said. Facebook previously stated it continues to counteract the spread of misinformation by flagging climate information and referring users to its Climate Change Science Center, which contains data from credible sources on the climate crisis. On Tuesday, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced that the center would expand to include more countries and information labels, which it adds to posts about the climate crisis for additional context. By Facebook’s own count, the Climate Change Science Center receives about 100,000 daily visits globally – a fraction of the number of users who view climate misinformation, according to the study.
All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/04/climate-misinformation-on-facebook-increasing-substantially-study-says
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