Twitter will promote credible information with new climate change topic after criticism over misinformation
Twitter is adding a topic that directs users to credible information about climate change in a new effort to combat the spread of misinformation, USA TODAY has learned.
If users follow the topic, they will see posts from global environmental and sustainability organizations, environmental activists, environmental researchers and environmental institutions in their feeds even if they don't follow those accounts.
Seán Boyle, Twitter’s head of sustainability, said the company is boosting authoritative information to “keep pace with the urgency of the climate crisis.”
The new feature comes one week after an Advance Democracy report shared exclusively with USA TODAY found that hundreds of thousands of posts denying climate change can be on social media platforms, many of them on Twitter.
Twitter has no policy to label or take down climate change misinformation. The company says introducing the climate change topic is one step it’s taking as it works on how to most effectively address climate change misinformation on its platform.
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“Step in the right direction, for sure, but the proof is in the pudding," said Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center and author of “The New Climate War.” "Let’s see how it plays out and how it works in practice.”
Twitter and the nation’s leading social media companies including Facebook, Google’s YouTube and TikTok are increasingly on the hot seat over climate change misinformation.
The companies tackled conspiracy theories, hoaxes and falsehoods about COVID-19 and vaccines, QAnon and the 2020 election but have been far less aggressive on climate change.
Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies disinformation and extremism, found that warning labels or links to credible information are frequently missing from social media posts that deny the existence of climate change, dispute its causes or underplay its effects.
On Twitter in 2020, there were nearly a half-million climate change denial posts, according to Advance Democracy. This year, there have been 83,590.
Falsehoods and hoaxes surged during the Texas blackout in February and President Joe Biden’s climate change summit in April.
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Posts with the hashtag #GrandSolarMinimum accounted for nearly 9% of all climate change denial content on Twitter, the report found.
The posts pointed to cold snaps around the world, including in Greenland, as purported evidence that the Grand Solar Minimum – a period during which the sun gives off less energy – is cooling the globe.
Scientists say the Grand Solar Minimum, which reduces average temperatures by a half a degree Fahrenheit or less, does little to offset global warming, yet all of the top five Twitter accounts pushing climate change denial promote claims it does.
“We recognize more can be done on services like Twitter to elevate credible climate information, including on how we can mitigate climate crisis harms,” Twitter told USA TODAY last week. “Our teams are thinking about ways we can best serve the global climate crisis conversation happening on the service, including through tools that surface and make reliable information and resources more readily available.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Twitter adds climate change topic under rising pressure to combat lies
