'Facebook Ducks Disinformation Criticisms With New 'Climate Information Center'
Facebook Ducks Disinformation Criticisms With New Climate Information Center. Daily Kos, Sept. 16, 2020. Excerpts, Ed:
It’s easy to see that there’s a problem with disinformation on Facebook. But a newly revealed internal memo from a former Facebook data scientist reveals the depth of the problem, compounded by the fact that it is met with a surface-level response from management that takes months to act on obviously bad behavior.
In her departing letter to coworkers reported by Buzzfeed, Sophie Zhang wrote that “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” because “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry,”- in Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador. This is true in the US, where COVID and climate myths are going, well, viral and spreading like, well, wildfire.
On both fronts, Facebook is taking basically the same response: set up new centers for information on COVID and climate, but otherwise take a relatively hands-off approach and do little to prevent disinformation from being shared.
Yesterday, Facebook rolled out a Climate Science Information Center, which, to give credit where it’s due, appears to be a perfectly respectable, IPCC-sourced source for science. But as basically everyone pointed out in response, this does nothing to prevent bad actors from using Facebook to spread self-serving propaganda. People who want the facts on climate change can find them pretty easily. That’s not really the problem. The problem is that there is a whole cottage industry dedicated to telling the public that actually climate change isn’t a problem. And unfortunately, that industry has an audience that trusts it, which is putting their own lives at risk.
Rush’s radio platform hardly needs Facebook to spread, the fact remains that similar denial-peddling, conservative punditry, often backed by fossil fuel interests, proliferates on the platform. Facebook is going to need to do more than just adding a disclaimer that climate change is real if it wants to keep its users safe...
More, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/16/1977832/-Facebook-Ducks-Disinformation-Criticisms-With-New-Climate-Information-Center
