Facebook to fund fact-checkers fighting ‘climate misinformation’

By Ailan Evans

Facebook announced a grant program Thursday to fund fact-checking groups combating the spread of “climate misinformation.”

The program is designed to provide Facebook users with accurate and reliable information on topics related to climate change, such as sea levels and global warming, Facebook announced. The company said it launched the initiative partly in response to an August report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that highlighted the negative impact humans have on the environment.

Fact-checking organizations will consult with climate scientists and researchers to identify and refute climate misinformation, according to the program’s description.

“Through our $1 million investment in this new grant program, we’ll invest in proposals that build alliances between fact-checkers, climate experts and other organizations to support projects that focus on combating climate misinformation,” Facebook said.

The program will offer grants up to $100,000 to fact-checking organizations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, a unit of the Poynter Institute that partners with Facebook. Organizations will be chosen by an independent selection committee, and applications for the grants are only open to groups with a “demonstrated track record of detecting and refuting climate change misinformation,” according to the program’s description.

“Misinformation about climate change is a huge, interconnected problem, and solutions need to be equally large and interconnected,” said John Cook, a research fellow at Monash University and selection committee member.

The initiative comes as Facebook faces pressure from the White House and others over its response to perceived misinformation circulating on its platform. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week demanding information into Facebook’s content moderation policies and threatening regulation, while President Joe Biden declared the tech giant was “killing people” by not adequately policing content related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Facebook also announced it will promote content from users that “raise awareness” of climate change and add new facts to its Climate Science Center, such as “the way scientists predict changes in climate patterns has proven to be reliable.”

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/AndersFrick

6 thoughts on “Facebook to fund fact-checkers fighting ‘climate misinformation’

  1. I can’t believe that people continue to support Facebook and Zuckerberg. This platform is anti-American, censors the truth, is a wing of the progressive theology, has interfered in our national elections and is it’s wealth is dangerous to our American life. You would think that people would have figured this out by now!

    I guess it’s just more important for people to show everyone what they had for dinner, where they are on vacation, showing pictures of the new grandchild, them getting an injection to prove how worthy they are in the covid-19 fight or a thousand other reasons why the gossip media platform is so important to their life.

    I’m not sure Zuckerberg is even human. He has an uncanny resemblance to DATA on Star Trek, The new Generation. His mannerisms, short hair and white pasty complexion combined with his expressionless response to questions and his preprogrammed answers are a dead giveaway to an empty shell being used to fundamentally change America. But, I guess if you don’t have a life of your own you just have to see what everyone else is doing while you sit at your computer jealously viewing your digital gossip device.

  2. Holding communication hostage was always the plan.
    Create dependence on something, then embargo it.
    Free speech?
    Get’em hooked on a device you can control the content of with 24/7 real time surveillance, for all communications and information, and you have a captured, enslaved population.
    Oh.
    Wait.
    Click, click, click…all those one’s and zero’s to tell me what is real and what is not in my world.
    Anyone taken a walk outside in Vermont lately?
    Just curious if there are any free-staters left out there…people who know the smell of fascism in the morning an’all…

  3. “…groups with a “demonstrated track record of detecting and refuting climate change misinformation” – Over the past year the principal group debunking climate disinformation is Climate Depot, a division of CFACT. I’m glad to hear Facebook will finally put a check on the pronouncements of the AGW cult religion. The Climate Panic Fanatics have gone on unchecked for too long and have cost us too much. They place our energy independence at risk, create shortfalls that most affect the disadvantaged. Facebook is showing considerable courage – some of the people who believe humans can control climate are genuine berserkers differing only in their dogma from PETA, a cult that kills animals to protect them.

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