Name: The urgency to combat climate misinformation
Uploaded: 2021-12-22
Duration: 7 min 5 s
Description: As climate misinformation tactics continue to evolve, social media platforms and new technologies emerge as frontline defenses.

As climate misinformation tactics continue to evolve, social media platforms and new technologies emerge as frontline defenses.

The urgency to combat climate misinformation

Environment

You have to take into account the fact that modeling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years, it's always been overestimating the amount of climate change that's actually taken place. A substantial number of have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. Anything we do now going to make any significant difference. What's happening here is there are people who have cultural, political, religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. It used to be that we would find lots of straight up climate denial. So climate change is a hoax. Um you know, it's a conspiracy, et cetera. Now we're seeing that these narratives have shifted from outright denial to something we call delay messaging and delay messaging is all about creating delay in climate action. So that messaging might suggest that particular solutions are in fact the way when we're a long way off having developed them, it might suggest that we in the West, so it shouldn't act until china and India have acted, for example, or it might suggest that certain groups are taking something away from another group or things that are going to cause a diversion and therefore also delaying climate action. If you think about miss informative content, it's often really salacious or really provocative, and that means it gets lots of engagement and get lots of shares and likes or dislikes, people agreeing or disagreeing with it. And that makes it really valuable content for the platforms. And you see it often flies through the recommendation algorithms very quickly. We look to see what is the extent of climate misinformation on the facebook platform, We took 195 known pages and groups That have published climate misinformation in the last 12 months And we analyzed a set of over 45,000 posts from those pages and groups by a crowd tangle. And we just looked at the extent of the climate misinformation from that. We found that there was an estimated between 818,000 and 1.36 million views of climate misinformation every single day. Climate misinformation from the worst pages grew 76.7% in the first nine months of 2021, so it's definitely growing in some sense. And what's more we found that only 3.6% of the content of the climate misinformation that we found has been fact checked, which is Facebook's other initiatives for combating climate misinformation, is to apply fact checking labels. So then the content is defunct in real time. So for Facebook to not recognize this is a bigger problem, It is huge. The technical definition of misinformation is that it's it's false information, but it's agnostic about the intent in the case of climate change, the outcome inevitably is delaying climate action. So the argument might be global warming isn't happening or humans aren't causing it or the impact won't be bad or the solutions won't work. But the conclusion is therefore we shouldn't act on climate change. now in order to adequately tackle misinformation, which is really complicated and interconnected. You need to take this holistic, interdisciplinary approach. So the four D project is a way of coming out misinformation from different angles, and the four Ds stand for detect deconstruct, debunked and deploy. First of all, you need to be able to detect the misinformation uh and detected quickly automatically ideally, because misinformation spread through social media so quickly. So we've trained a machine learning model to be able to automatically detect the different claims of misinformation. Then you need to ascertain the claims misinformation or not, and we use critical thinking methods to do that. Then you need to debunk them, which involves explaining the techniques used to mislead in misinformation. And lastly, having done all that work, you need to get that stuff out to the public. So what I think a lot of people don't understand is that advertising funds the internet, but this funding model is causing huge problems because it's actually incentivizing people to produce this information. So you've got people who actually can fund their entire operations or earn loads more than their peers because they're producing content that is so fallacious. And advertising next to increasingly, brands are recognizing that they don't want to be seen next to uh content that denies that climate change exists or that is showing doubt or conspiracy around climate action, which is essential because, you know, this kind of misinformation causes harm. They don't want to be seen next to what is seen as harmful content increasingly. And so if brands and advertisers pull advertisers pulled their money from particular platforms or particular newspapers or or from particular sites on google that will actually it will shift the information environment and what is profitable, definitely social media platforms should be doing more. And I think that acknowledges to whether it's flagging the misinformation posts or adjusting their algorithm so that they're less likely to go viral or penalizing repeat offenders or posting fact checking authority of information or pushing authority of information forward. There's lots of different tools and I think that should be using all of them. Climate communication science shows that when people see myths about climate change and its impacts or that it whether it exists or not, when people see that misinformation, they tend to uh they'll vote differently, they'll consume differently. They'll think differently about the climate. We can start to see the real world consequences of misinformation can be anything from undermining faith in democracy, undermining faith in the institutions and the processes that are so important to help us solve big things like climate change. And I think unless we get on top of this, we've got problems in the future when we try and create global or local solutions to some of the big problems that you know that we face as humanity, people often ask me and what can we do about climate change. And I think the most important thing we can do is just open our mouths and talk about it. We need to have climate conversations. We need to break climate silence in order to build the social momentum that leads to the political momentum that creates a real change. Mm hmm.