From Hurricane Milton to the Remington Fire, many Americans experienced extreme weather events firsthand in 2024. Yet according to many tech and social media companies, the story behind these disasters is a far cry from what people witnessed.
DevX recently reported on the ways social media companies have "failed to protect" the general public from "false climate narratives," instead allowing "fossil fuel propaganda" and misinformation.
It cited a new report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, which examined major platforms including Meta and X, formerly known as Twitter.
It found a number of disturbing trends. Firstly, these platforms are allowing "super spreaders" of misinformation on behalf of Big Oil. Meta alone had accepted over $17 million and generated over 700 million impressions on behalf of these dirty energy companies.
"For the third year running, CAAD has documented millions of dollars of fossil fuel advertising," Sean Buchan, CAAD's intelligence unit coordinator, said. He also pointed out that much of this happened in the leadup to the COP29 summit, where international leaders gathered to examine progress on cutting pollution and meeting environmental goals.
"While the world meets to try to keep the Paris Agreement promise, the fossil fuel industry pollutes the information ecosystem to cloud our minds," Buchan said.
Additionally, social media platforms that allow the rapid spread of misinformation have drummed up support for conspiracy theories about extreme weather.
Scientists have found that weather events have been increasing in frequency and severity because of the planet-heating pattern known as the greenhouse effect, which is amplified by human-caused pollution. Yet despite these repeated findings, conspiracy theories have been circulating online that wildfires and hurricanes are somehow deliberately caused to clear land for renewable energy developments. In some cases, this has even led to threats of violence against emergency response workers.
To counter the damage done by their platforms, CAAD's report calls on Big Tech to address its role in the spread of misinformation from Big Oil and conspiracy theorists. This could be achieved with greater transparency around information integrity, DevX explained, considering that reduced access to data makes it "more difficult for research efforts to quantify the scale of the disinformation problem on their platforms."
And for the average social media consumer, it's important to look for verified news sources rather than anonymous Facebook posts when it comes to news.
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