Facebook steps up efforts to fight lies about climate change
Climate change has emerged as a key priority in Facebook’s quest to stomp out misinformation while still defending free speech
San Francisco — In the midst of the heated US presidential race in mid-2020, with hypercharged scrutiny of partisan propaganda on social media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a letter from a group of US senators led by Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren that had nothing to do with elections. They were angry about a year-old piece of climate news.
A Washington Examiner article shared on Facebook in 2019 had denounced climate models, which are widely used by scientists around the world to measure and predict the effects of warmer temperatures. Science Feedback, an outside organisation that Facebook works with on fact-checking, had labelled the story false. A review by five scientists found the story “highly misleading” because of “false factual assertions” and accused the authors of “cherry-picking data sets.”..
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