Platforms Foment Climate Misinformation

When Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at DePaul University, was researching ads on Twitter during the global climate change conference COP26 last month, she saw ads with phrases like “lower carbon,” “reducing methane emissions” and “net-zero emissions.” These ads did not come from eco-conscious startups or conservation NGOs, but from companies that sell fossil fuel. Hopke said this kind of messaging is called fossil-fuel solutionism or cherry-picking data because it casts an overly rosy picture of oil and gas companies’ environmental impact—whatever efforts these companies are making to fight climate change is dwarfed by the existential threat their business models pose to the planet. And this kind of messaging, in addition to more flagrant climate misinformation, can be found all over social media, Hopke said. In 2020, 25,147 ads from just 25 oil and gas organizations were seen over 431 million times, according to an August 2021 report from climate-change think tank Influence Map. Of these, 48% adopted a solutionism framework. A report from environmental group Stop Funding Hate found that there are up to 1.36 million views of climate misinformation daily on Facebook, just 3.6% of which has been fact-checked. This report didn’t take into account straight ads from oil and gas companies, though did evaluate climate-misinformation adverts from the Facebook Ad Library, much of which came from conservative media company PragerU. How PR Firms Shape—and Often Obstruct—Climate Change Policies Against this backdrop, and a consumer base increasingly wary of climate change, platforms and brands are starting to respond. On Oct. 7, Google took the strongest stand by prohibiting both the monetization of content and ads that contradict “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Brands are also trying to be part of the solution. In April, the World Federation of Advertisers launched the Planet Pledge, designed to help marketers meet the challenges in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But interviews with five industry experts say these are just the first steps in a problem that is both expansive and insidious. How misinformation proliferates on platforms Climate communication researchers say that the policies of platforms structurally benefit those promoting inaccurate or misleading climate information, especially when the content comes from companies themselves. Twitter banned political ads in 2019, which thwarts environmental NGOs who want to take out political ads, but not fossil fuel purveyors, said Sean Buchan, researcher at Stop Funding Heat. “You’re not allowed to advertise political or social adverts if you’re a climate-change charity, but oil and gas companies are still advertising on Twitter …. which seems a little bit backward,” Buchan said. Around COP26, Twitter rolled out pre-bunks, hubs of authoritative information about climate change, which the platform promoted. Hopke said pre-bunking mitigates deception by directing people toward higher-quality information but does not solve the problem. “I did not see corrections appended to specific advertisements,” she said. Meta adopts a similar, if somewhat stronger, approach. In policies announced both in 2020 and earlier this year, the platform announced a Climate Science Center, which brandishes factual information and solutions for combatting climate change, and works with a team of fact-checkers to flag false content. The platform stops short of removing misinformation itself. “Facebook is engaging in its own greenwashing,” Buchan said, arguing these efforts are far outweighed by how often climate misinformation is viewed on the platform. Especially compared to other platforms, Google’s policy to actually remove misinformation is a good one, Buchan said. “It depends on their definition [of climate misinformation],” noting it may be too narrow to count subtler types of greenwashing. Steps brands can take Aside from leaving the work all to platforms, brands themselves are taking efforts to stop greenwashing in their own marketing. Oil and gas companies aren’t the only perpetrators of greenwashing, and there are ways for brands whose products haven’t quite reached carbon neutrality to meaningfully use their marketing to fight against climate change. Marketers need to make sure brands’ advertised climate change efforts aren’t undermined by other parts of the business, said Mark Baschnonga, joint head of strategy at Mindshare. “[Brands] have to think about if their business is making it worse elsewhere,” he said. “That’s not to say that you have to be 100% clean and perfect.” Baschnonga recommends marketers focus on one concrete action the company is doing to mitigate their climate impact and explain it in depth. “You make that information easily discoverable and that goes a long way to building trust with consumers,” he said. Some greenwashing comes from a lack of knowledge regarding climate communication best practices, said Stephan Loerke, who helps spearhead the CMO Planet Pledge as CEO of the WFA. “To use marketing for good helps us move consumer behavior and part of that agenda is making sure the way those products and services being promoted are substantiated,” he said. As the challenges of climate change start to affect more people, its important brands and platforms fix these problems before people wise up. "Consumers [will] genuinely make a different choice,” Buchan said.

Platforms

Platforms Foment Climate Misinformation, Creating a Thorny Landscape for Brands

Fossil-fuel solutionism has proliferated on social media

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff