The Technology 202: Researchers warn misinformation on Facebook threatens to undermine Biden’s climate agenda

The top-performing false narratives pushed the idea that renewable energy sources are not effective or reliable, accounting for more than half of the likes, shares and other interactions on these posts. 

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone pushed back on Avaaz’s findings, saying many of the views would have been on posts where fact checks were applied. He also said their tally of fact-checked posts didn’t account for three posts with “missing context” labels. Avaaz countered that Facebook added labels after it concluded its research. 

Some of the posts Avaaz identified went unlabeled on Facebook because they were shared by politicians and Facebook has a controversial policy of not appending fact checks to their posts.

“While we’re always working to improve, just because Avaaz claims a piece of content breaks our rules doesn’t always mean it does,” spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. 

These false posts were pushed by 56 pages, 17 groups and 83 profiles, which as of April 9, had a combined total of 58,138,998 followers or members. Avaaz had previously reported 12 of the accounts for sharing fact-checked misinformation, underscoring how some accounts repeatedly violate Facebook’s policies. 

The report underscores how climate misinformation is the next front in the disinformation battles. 

The Jan. 6 Capitol attacks highlighted the costs of political misinformation and violent rhetoric online, while the pandemic has put a fine point on the dangers of health misinformation and content undermining vaccines. 

Avaaz researchers warn that false online narratives about climate change could make it more politically challenging for global leaders to unite to address the threat. They say on social media, purveyors of misinformation are trying to convince people it’s not an important issue, even as extreme weather events across the country highlight the stakes of inaction. 

“It’s kind of like a malignant cancer you don’t see, where these lies are continuing to spread in the body of the international community,” said Fadi Quran, Avaaz campaign director. 

Major news events drove much of the misinformation that researchers detected. 

The extreme weather in Texas and subsequent power outages as well Biden’s executive order to rescind the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline were used to drive the majority of false narratives the researchers found. Misinformation related to these events accounted for 73 percent of all the estimated views in Avaaz’s findings. 

Avaaz said some of the most viral claims came from Fox News. Three of the posts that Avaaz identified were quotes or videos from Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host,  in which he made baseless claims that frozen wind turbines caused the Texas energy crisis. As of yesterday, Facebook had not applied a fact-check label to any of these posts, even though Carlson’s claims were debunked by four separate Facebook fact-checking partners, Avaaz says. Avaaz estimates the posts amassed 7,662.650 views, 31 percent of the total. 

The researchers’ findings underscore how falsehoods can be shared on social media more widely and quickly than factual reports. Avaaz says the top misinformation posts in its data sets generated far more likes, comments and other interactions than the top ten posts from the New York Times and The Washington Post over the same period. The posts containing misinformation garnered more than three times as many interactions as the top Times posts, and more than six times as many interactions as the top Post posts. 

The findings come as Facebook and other social networks are under pressure to do more to address climate-related falsehoods.

Facebook has created a Climate Science Information Center, where it works to elevate factual content about energy and climate issues. It also is working with its independent network of global fact checkers and removing accounts that repeatedly break its rules. 

But Avaaz says Facebook also needs to start fact-checking politicians’ posts. Quran said the dangers of Facebook’s hands-off approach were highlighted in the U.S. election. 

“Our position is that Facebook needs to fact check all users equally, otherwise they create a loophole where politicians are incentivized to share and boost the virality of misinformation,” Quran said. 

The researchers are calling on the Biden administration to move quickly to address online disinformation. 

They shared their findings with The Post a day after the White House hosted a key climate summit, where Biden sought to restore U.S. leadership in global climate action and encourage more than 40 other leaders to make cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. 

Avaaz is calling on the administration to adopt a national disinformation strategy, which would focus on addressing online falsehoods across government. The group also wants the administration to move quickly to appoint a special envoy to the Global Engagement Center to ensure misinformation is not undermining cooperation on climate change. 

A unanimous high court ruled that federal law does not authorize the FTC to go to court to seek penalties from companies with dishonest practices, Robert Barnes and Rachel Lerman report. The commission said it has obtained $11.2 billion in refunds to customers in the past five years, and called for Congress to act quickly to expand its authorities. 

“The Supreme Court ruled in favor of scam artists and dishonest corporations, leaving average Americans to pay for illegal behavior,” FTC chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said in a statement. “With this ruling, the court has deprived the FTC of the strongest tool we had to help consumers when they need it most.” 

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said she is working to pass legislation “immediately” to make sure the FTC can still get money for consumers. 

“Protecting consumers and compensating them for harm is a paramount duty of the FTC,” she said in a statement.

Beijing’s city government said it bought Oracle database technology for a “smart policing” surveillance project to apply facial recognition technology to car drivers, The Intercept’s Mara Hvistendahl reports.  An Oracle document said the company’s servers were used by the People’s Armed Police, a domestic-focused paramilitary force, and procurement records show that the country’s Ministry of Public Security also bought its databases.

In response, Oracle touted its compliance with export control regulations. “We go beyond what one might anticipate from export control regulations,” Oracle vice president Ken Glueck said. “We vet partners, and we have a track record globally of ending partner relationships where there has been some violation in our view.” Glueck also said that two companies listed on the company’s website are not current partners.

The internal report was issued less than a week after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers the company “made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm” in the runup to the riot, BuzzFeed News’s Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Jane Lytvynenko report. The analysis of the right-wing “Stop the Steal” movement, which spread baseless claims of election fraud, says the company’s decision to look at offshoot groups as distinct entities strengthened them.

“Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to take down individual Groups and Pages once they exceeded a violation threshold,” the report said. “After the Capitol Insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country, we realized that the individual delegitimizing Groups, Pages and slogans did constitute a cohesive movement.”

A Facebook spokesperson said the company took steps to limit content that tried to delegitimize the election, including by removing the original Stop the Steal group. “As we’ve said previously, we still saw problematic content on our platform during this period and we know that we didn’t catch everything,” the company said in a statement. “This is not a definitive report. It’s a product of one of many teams who are continuing to study what happened so we can continue improving our content moderation.”

Twitter reacted to the Facebook story exactly how you would expect. Journalist Alex Kantrowitz:

Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media:

Georgia Public Broadcasting reporter Stephen Fowler:

• A Senate Judiciary Committee panel holds a hearing on social media amplification and algorithms on April 27 at 10 a.m.
• A Senate Commerce Committee panel holds a hearing on coronavirus-related scams and identity theft on April 27 at 10 a.m.
• A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee panel holds a hearing on federal IT management on April 27 at 10 a.m.
• Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Wilson discusses digital markets at a NetChoice event on April 27 at 1 p.m.
• The Senate Commerce Committee holds a nomination hearing for Eric Lander, President Biden’s pick to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, on April 29 at 10 a.m.
• Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, discusses the implications of a recent software-related Supreme Court decision at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event on April 29 at 12:30 p.m.

Happy (belated) Earth Day!