Facebook is ramping up its efforts to inform users about the ongoing climate crisis. To combat climate change myths, the platform is expanding its Climate Science Information Center, and will even start debunking common misconceptions.
Facebook Targets Climate Change Misinformation
Facebook is doing more to help users understand the effects of climate change. A post on the About Facebook blog revealed that Facebook is “expanding and improving” its Climate Science Information Center, and is also “introducing new ways for people to discover it.”
The Climate Science Information Center currently provides users with scientific resources and information from credible climate change organizations. As part of Facebook’s new initiative, the hub will now feature a section dedicated to debunking climate change myths.
The platform is teaming up with climate change experts from the George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the University of Cambridge to provide facts about the environmental impact of climate change.
Facebook is also testing a feature that will add informational labels to posts about climate change. The platform already tacks labels on posts related to COVID-19, and its climate-related labels won’t look much different.
These labels are currently going for a test run in the UK, and will likely reach other countries soon. It’s still unclear what types of posts will be labeled, but there’s a good chance that it will target posts with climate change misinformation.
Although Facebook’s climate center is already available in France, Germany, the UK, and the US, the platform is now rolling it out to several more countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, and Taiwan.
In countries where Facebook’s climate center isn’t available, the platform will redirect users to the UN Environment Programme when they search for climate-related information.
Facebook already debuted a COVID-19 Information Center that provides resources related to the pandemic, and even rolled out a voting information hub during the 2020 US elections. The Climate Science Information Center was first introduced in September 2020, shortly after Facebook was criticized for its handling of misinformation about the California wildfires.
Facebook Seeks to Amend Past Mistakes
Facebook is often guilty of seeing what it can get away with before making any changes. As soon as Facebook got flack for harboring misinformation about climate change, only then did it decide to take action.
It did exactly the same with hate speech, and allowed anti-Semitic conspiracies and other types of racist remarks on the platform with no filter—yet another issue that Facebook took way too long to address.