Facebook Fails To Flag Climate Denial, Study Finds

 

Climate change denial is spreading unchecked on Facebook, two studies by disinformation researchers have found.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said less than 10% of misleading posts were marked as misinformation.

And the CCDH researchers linked the majority of these to just 10 publishers.

Facebook said this represented a small proportion of climate change content.

The CCDH is a non-profit organisation which monitors and lobbies against online hate and misinformation.

It found that of 7,000 misleading posts describing climate change as "hysteria", "alarmism", a "scam", or other related terms, only 8% were marked as misinformation.

Facebook pledged to flag climate denial content early this year.

The CCDH looked at a sample of posts from the past year which attracted roughly 700,000 likes and shares. Researchers used social media analytics tool Newswhip to search for strings of key words including "climate change", global warming" and, "fraud", "hoax", "cult", "scam", "lie" and so on.

- bbc.com