Facebook drives those unsure about climate change to denial, report says.
Global Witness released a report that find that the social media platform’s algorithm increased doubts about the climate emergency as opposed to pointing people to more reliable information.
They found this by creating two decoy users - ‘Jane’ who sought out climate sceptic views and ‘John’ who followed more mainstream science on the topic - to track what each user would be shown by the website for two months.
Jane was given posts from figures that denied the existence of human-made climate change, pages that called it a “hoax” and disparaged goes at stopping catastrophic rises in temperatures.
Other posts on Jane’s feed alleged that the “green movement” was “enslaving humanity” and that the United Nations was “an authoritarian regime with less credibility than Bugs Buggy”.
Only one of the pages recommended to Jane did not contain any climate-change disinformation. In comparison, John - who liked pages such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who say that disinformation is one of the biggest issues when it comes to tackling the root cause - was always shown more trusted pages on his feed in the same period, while Jane was given more and more radical content.
A Meta company spokesperson told the BBC: “Our systems are designed to reduce misinformation, including climate misinformation, not to amplify it.
"We use a combination of artificial intelligence, human review, and input from partners - including fact-checkers - to address problematic content.
"When they rate this content as false, we add a warning label and reduce its distribution so fewer people see it.”
In addition, they have announced $1 million to support organisations tackle the issue.
