The next front in Facebook's misinformation battle: climate change

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In August 2019, when a Facebook employee typed 'climate change' into the platform's search bar, the auto-fill suggestions that popped up included 'climate change debunked' and 'climate change is a hoax.'

This week, Meta announced additional climate-related efforts that coincided with the start of the COP26 Climate Summit, where world leaders gathered to discuss efforts to prevent catastrophic disruptions due to climate change. Meta was already facing heavy scrutiny following the leak of tens of thousands of pages of internal documents Haugen took from the company, now known as the"Facebook Papers.

But the company's own research has hinted at limitations with some of its strategy, including highlighting user trust and awareness issues with its Climate Science Center, a dedicated hub for climate change information that launched last year, the documents show. Some employees have also expressed concern that Facebook's current efforts aren't sufficient, documents show.

Experts, however, say the stakes could not be higher for Facebook to further ramp up its solutions for this problem — and soon. "Facebook is a key place for people to get information related to climate change, so there is an opportunity to build knowledge through our platform," according to one internal report posted in April. However, the researchers found user awareness of the Climate Science Center was low. The report said 66% of users surveyed who had visited the center"say they are not aware" of it; 86% of those who hadn't visited it said they didn't know about it.

Meta, however, says that research was meant to inform internal discussions but was not representative of its user base and therefore not to measure casual relationships between its users and real-world issues. It also notes that some outside research has found that, in general, people in the United States are less likely to believe in climate change than people from other countries.

 

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