Soon, those who share fake news about climate change on social networks will have a hard time. Facebook announces a crackdown, starting with the United Kingdom.
Facebook will begin flagging fake news about climate change shared through the platform: the flagging will take the form of a label that directs users to Facebook's Climate science information center, an archive of verified information and news on the environment. The experiment, at least in its initial phase, will concern only users in the United Kingdom.
According to the Guardian, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has not yet announced the criteria by which it will determine which posts receive a flag. The algorithm will nonetheless be very similar to the one used during the recent US election campaign (and in the days immediately following, marked by outgoing president Donald Trump's strong allegations of electoral fraud) to distinguish truthful posts from those sharing commonplaces, misconceptions or straightforward fake news. In that case too, Facebook labelled the post in question with a link redirecting users to a Voting information center.
In the new section of the Climate science information center, also accessible in Italy, Facebook attempts to debunk false myths related to the environment, such as the claim that polar bears are not really endangered by global warming, or conversely that excess carbon emissions benefit plant life. To develop this content, Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including the University of Cambridge.
"The spread of harmful falsehoods endangers the level of international cooperation needed to prevent global warming," Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge academic who collaborated on the project, explained to the Guardian. "Facebook is in a unique position to counter the circulation of disinformation online and the myth-busting section is an important step towards exposing dangerous falsehoods."
