(Yahoo) – Facebook Inc. will begin labeling some user posts that mention climate change in the same way it has annotated posts discussing elections and Covid-19, a sign the social network is taking climate-related misinformation more seriously.
The labels will direct users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center — an existing hub that includes related news articles, climate change data and recommendations for Pages to follow. The new labels will be added to some posts about climate change, regardless of their accuracy, a strategy Facebook has used with other widely discussed topics as a way to fight falsehoods.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has argued that the best way to keep misinformation from spreading on its networks is not just to remove misleading posts, but to offer people accurate information from authoritative sources. The labels are rolling out first to users in the U.K., though the plan is to bring them to more countries soon, according to a Facebook blog post.
Facebook has been used to spread climate misinformation in much the same way the service is used for sharing all kinds of misleading posts. False statements about climate change reviewed by Facebook’s fact-checkers are flagged, but unlike Covid-19 misinformation, climate posts are not typically removed. That’s because Facebook doesn’t consider most climate misinformation to pose an imminent threat of harm, which is the bar for removing false information from the service. READ MORE
