Climate scientists and activists have since fled the platform now known as X since the Elon Musk takeover last year.

A report released on Wednesday by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a coalition of more than 50 environmental groups, scored several social media platforms. The company with the most points ranked the highest in fighting climate misinformation.

The platforms could receive up to 21 points from a combination of categories including transparency, advertising, policy content, and enforcing their rules on climate misinformation. X only received a single point for “lacking clear policies that address climate misinformation, having no substantive public transparency mechanisms, and offering no evidence of effective policy enforcement,” the report said.

All other platforms ranked higher. YouTube came in second to last with 6 points. Meta and Instagram tied at 8 points, TikTok received 9 points. Pinterest came out on top with 12 points.

“Pinterest has been pretty proactive with working with our coalition in regards to having a content moderation policy that addresses climate change misinformation,” Erika Seiber, a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, told Earther.

Though social media users can always log off, researchers reasoned that it is important to hold these platforms accountable for their lack of climate misinformation policies, or for the lack of regular enforcement. Americans are increasingly getting their information about breaking news and social issues from social media apps. A 2021 report from the Pew Research Center outlined that almost half of U.S. adults regularly received their news from social media.

“[Platforms] have a substantive impact on the way that we talk about climate change, climate solutions, renewable energy, and climate policy as a whole,” Seiber explained. “All the extreme weather events that have happened over the summer, whether it be the heat waves or the wildfires in Hawaii, misinformation has created a lot of confusion around the cause of the fires.”

Before Elon Musk purchased the platform last year, the app had once banned advertisements that contradicted climate science. But now it’s not clear how new leadership has addressed this, if at all. “Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report said.

The Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition reached out to X and the other platforms mentioned in the report while compiling the information but did not receive a response from X. Seiber explained that before Musk purchased the website, environmental justice organizations like Friends of the Earth had a reliable contact with X when it was still Twitter. But Musk stripped down the company’s content moderation team which led to less insight into how the company handles misinformation.

The Musk takeover of X, formerly Twitter, has had other consequences. Environmentalists and experts who once used the site for education and community building began to see a shift in their online interactions. This sparked an exodus of climate voices.

“There’s been a massive change. I get so much abuse and rude comments now,” Mark Maslin, a climate scientist professor at University College London, told The Guardian this year.

  • cricket97@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There have been no policy changes on climate misinformation since Musk bought twitter. I get everyone here loves to hate him but this is a dumb article designed to get clicks by an organization that wants people to be banned from internet platforms for “climate misinformation”

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/23/twitter-bans-ads-deny-climate-crisis

      Twitter chose Earth Day to announce it will ban advertisements that deny the scientific consensus on climate crisis.

      Note: ads, not user tweets.

      Same year : https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494220/elon-musk-twitter-climate-misinformation-rise-analysis

      There have been more tweets and retweets “using climate-sceptic terminology” in 2022 than in any other year since Twitter’s founding in 2006,

      So yeah, there has been “no change”…in other words, climate denialism is free to proliferate on TwittX, and proliferate it has.

      Not sure why you place climate misinformation in quotes, it is indeed a thing, but personally I prefer “denier lies”.

      • cricket97@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When has the appropriate response to people being stupid to ban being stupid? People have the right to converse how they wish. We can’t ban people being wrong, and trying to suppress information only makes people more curious about it. There are people like me who want a public platform where you can be critical of nearly anything. I think it’s good for a healthy society to be able to discuss controversial topics, even if people are wrong about it. You can’t force people to believe what you believe, even if you think it’s backed with factual information.