Facebook Failing To Label Climate Change Denial Posts, Study Finds
Facebook has made lofty promises in the past about its efforts to tackle climate misinformation, but according to one non-profit organization’s research, the company is not doing a particularly good job at labeling and identifying climate denial content on its platform. In February last year, the company announced fresh plans to combat misleading content covering climate change. As part of its efforts, the company expanded its Climate Science Information Center resource to more markets, and added a dedicated facts section for debunking climate-related hoaxes.
The most significant step, however, was labeling posts that contained dubious or misleading information about climate change. The plans started with a pilot test in the UK, followed by further expansion a few months later in regions in like Canada, France, Germany, and the US. Similar to other promises Facebook has made in the past, the company’s climate change disinformation campaign appears to have been half-heartedly executed. While that might not be all that surprising to some, how soon those claims have now been put into question is somewhat startling.
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According to a report from the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Facebook failed to label nearly half of the problematic posts in a sample pool that promoted climate change denial discourse. CCDH compiled a 'Toxic Ten' list last year that included ten publications deemed to be contributing up to 69 percent of interactions covering climate-related misinformation. The non-profit shortlisted 184 articles that collectively generated over one million interactions on Facebook, and then identified the most popular post for each. Per
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