CLIMATE CHANGE
denialism: Facebook
            is a powerful
new tool in the        
       DISINFORMERS'
                             PLAYBOOKS

The scale of climate misinformation on Facebook is staggering and increasing quite substantially, a new analysis of thousands of posts has found.

A report released by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent watchdog group, and the environmental non-profit Stop Funding Heat, analyzed a dataset of more than 195 Facebook pages and groups. Researchers found an estimated 45,000 posts downplaying or denying the climate crisis, which have received a combined total of between 818,000 and 1.36m views.

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” pages. 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. Facebook has long been criticized for the spread of climate misinformation on its platforms.
In May 2021, progressive non-profit Avaaz reported an estimated 25m views of misinformation related to climate science and renewable energy within just 60 days in the US.

Source:[23]

Research from Avaaz shows that in President Biden’s first 60 days in office, misinformation related to climate science and renewable energy racked up an estimated 25 million views across Facebook. While climate disinformation campaigns have been waged for decades, Facebook is a powerful new tool in misinformers’ playbooks Avaaz’s research supports the hypothesis that tactics to prevent climate action are shifting away from outright climate change denialism, and toward more subtle misinformation narratives that promote inactivism, such as by asserting that it is too late to act on climate, promoting ineffective solutions to the climate crisis, or baselessly attacking effective forms of climate change mitigation.

For instance, the most common misinformation narrative in our dataset did not deny the existence of climate change, but instead framed span renewable energy sources like wind as being inefficient, unreliable, or otherwise harmful.

The phenomenon of climate misinformation itself is nothing new but we have entered a new era where the very architecture of social media, which has become central to connecting the world, fuels its spread.

Some of the false and misleading narratives in our findings have a deep history and ties to powerful actors, most significantly the fossil fuel industry. The oil and gas company ExxonMobil knew about the impact that continuing to burn fossil fuels would have on global warming at least as early as 1981, and yet continued to lobby as if it did not.

Climate denialist organizations such as the Heartland Institute have been reported as deploying a variety of misinformation tactics such as recruiting CELEBRITY CONTRARIANS to deny climate change and publishing climate denialist materials (90% of climate denialist books from 1972 - 2005 were produced by conservative think tanks). In the wider community of climate denialist organizations, we also see a tactic of taking advantage of the journalistic norm of reporting on both sides of an issue to push climate denialist voices into the mainstream.

The journalistic norm of EQUAL COVERAGE has contributed to a false balance on climate change science: in presenting both sides as “equal,” climate change denialists have been given undue scientific legitimacy in the media.

Actors seeking to sabotage efforts to tackle the climate emergency are shifting to social media, a significantly more powerful tool to misinform hundreds of millions of citizens.

Facebook is not the only platform where false information spreads. Researchers from New York University demonstrated in January how
Twitter bots are a major source of climate disinformation. Additionally,
Avaaz research from early last year exposed climate misinformation on YouTube seen by millions.

Although Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that climate change misinformation on the platform is a big problem in testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittees hearing on March 25, 2021, the company has failed to effectively fight falsehoods and distortions about the climate emergency and enforce its own policies.

Climate-related claims collected between January 20 and March 20, 2021 promoted the following 8 overarching narratives, listed in descending order of total estimated views:

^[1] Renewable energy sources are not effective or reliable.
(12,8M views)

^[2] President Biden and his allies have profited from environmental policies such as rescinding the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. (4,7M views)

^[3] President Biden's environmental executive orders have caused the price of oil to increase and/or have caused the US to lose its 'energy independence'.
(2,7M views)

^[4] President Biden favors the energy/economic interests of other countries over those of the US.
(811K views)

^[5] Cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline will lead to large-scale
waste of resources.
(499K views)

^[6] Scientists are controlling and/or negatively affecting the weather and ecosystem.
(373K views)

^[7] The Biden administration is to blame for the widespread power outages in Texas and remained silent on the issue.
(306K views)

^[8] Climate change is not caused by humans and the negative consequences of climate change are exaggerated.
(207K views)

False or misleading claims related to the Texas winter storm (On February 11-20, 2021) most often fed into the overarching narrative that renewable energy sources are not effective or reliable. For instance, the highest-performing claim was that frozen wind turbines “caused” the Texas energy crisis. Other trending posts falsely claimed that helicopters had to spray frozen wind turbines in Texas with chemicals “made from fossil fuels” to de-ice them.
The photo used in the post was actually from Sweden (not Texas), and the helicopter was spraying hot water (not chemicals).

Source:[24]