Platforms' policies on climate change misinformation (V1)
Maps how the five platforms address climate misinformation, revealing uneven and weak climate-specific rules.
Executive summary
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This EU DisinfoLab factsheet, published in September 2023, compares the climate misinformation policies of five major platforms - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube - examining their content moderation frameworks, user-facing guidance, and public commitments on climate-related false content. Rather than quantifying the volume of climate misinformation present on each platform, the analysis focuses on gaps and inconsistencies in stated policy.
It finds that platforms generally lack comprehensive, climate-specific policies despite having taken some steps to label or flag misleading content, and that none of the platforms studied regularly publishes data on the effectiveness of its own mitigation efforts, limiting external ability to assess the scale of the problem. X/Twitter is singled out as notably weaker than its peers on transparency and policy disclosure, though the factsheet does not provide quantified comparative metrics.
The report concludes by calling for stronger regulatory tools, including enforcement under the Digital Services Act, and argues platforms should extend their response beyond content moderation to include demonetizing climate-denial content through advertising systems.
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