Social Media is Polluted

The necessity for a society of scientific citizens rises as the difficulties and environmental repercussions of climate change become more apparent. However, given the prevalence of fake news and its ability to sow major concerns, getting there will not be easy. This article will outline the importance of social media and how you can spot greenwashing, so that you can better understand how to tackle fake news in this area and the stigma around climate change.

To start this article about misinformation on climate change and greenwashing on social media platforms, it is important to understand what greenwashing is. Greenwashing is the practice of major corporations promoting or branding themselves as part of the climate solution while working behind the scenes to undermine or limit the reach of climate policies and regulations. The previous few years have been dubbed "the Golden Age of Greenwashing." These types of stunts are, of course, as ancient as advertising itself. Greenwashing, on the other hand, is a more modern phenomena that involves a company's purposeful attempt to hide or deflect from its environmental damage (We’re living in a golden age of green...).

According to Supran, the Harvard researcher, greenwashing campaigns by carbon-intensive industries use a variety of "discourses of delay," such as raising the threat of energy poverty, undermining the reliability of green energy, exaggerating the potential of technology, or presenting fossil fuels as a solution to climate change (Lewton and McCool 2021). Supran and Harvard University colleague Naomi Oreskes published research earlier last year demonstrating that these "mutually reinforcing" discourses of delay are "communicating the idea that individual consumers are the primary cause of climate change, and companies are simply innocent suppliers giving their customers what they demand," he says (Lewton and McCool 2021).

Along with greenwashing, the misinformation on global change is a huge threat. The World Economic Forum (WEF) identified 50 global hazards in 2013 and defined three risk constellations based on an investigation of the network of relationships between these risks. "Digital Wildfires in a Hyper-connected World," for example, is concerned with the spread of misinformation online, notably through social media, and mentions the "severe ramifications" and potential to "wreak havoc in the actual world" (WEF, 2013). The World Economic Forum named Online Misinformation as one of the top ten global trends affecting the world the following year (WEF, 2014).

The challenge of increasing sea levels is not being met by social media firms. Climate change is a serious threat, but firms are addressing misinformation about it with significantly less urgency than other issues such as political conspiracy theories, hate speech, and Covid vaccination misrepresentation. Because climate content is considered opinion, it is exempt from conventional fact-checking methods, a loophole that climate change sceptics have exploited to get false information onto the sites (Bensinger 2021).

Belief systems and faulty logic, in which users consume information that is consistent with their beliefs; and social norms, in which acceptance of misinformation is heavily influenced by social norms, with people tending to trust information received from people in their social network (Bessi et al., 2014; Friggeri et al., 2014; Mocanu et al., 2014; Vicario et al., 2016). Ideology, morals, and social norms all play a part in people's attitudes on climate change, according to research (Corner, Markowitz, & Pidgeon, 2014; Gifford, 2011), and it's been suggested that climate change is a belief system (Bhagwat, Economou, & Thornton, 2016), demonstrating that people with certain ideologies, belief systems, and social norm judgments about climate change are more likely to distribute, consume, and accept climate change misinformation on social media platforms.

Last year, popular social media platforms introduced a flagging system in which users could identify misinformation and alert the companies. Bill Posters, Eco-Bot.net cofounder and disinformation researcher, wondered why similar tools didn’t exist for climate change. In September, a main popular social media platform did declare that some posts about climate change will be labelled with a link to their Climate Science Information Center, Posters calls this a "public relations exercise" that only moderates hundreds of articles every day on a platform with over 3 billion members (Lewton and McCool 2021). When asked what this platform is doing to combat ads that make false statements about climate change, a spokesperson said that "more than 100,000 people visit the Climate Science Center every day," and that "we reject ads when one of our independent fact-checking partners rates them as false or misleading, and take action against Pages, Groups, accounts, and websites that share content rated as false on a regular basis." (Lewton and McCool 2021).

In conclusion, the importance of spotting how platforms greenwash will be really important now and in the future, this will stop the spread of misinformation on social media sites. But is this enough to allow the change of information processed to users?

By Bethany Mundy.

References

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