Facebook Launches Climate Project to Tackle Misinformation

"These companies have a monopoly and dominate the market when it comes to how people get informed, communicate and debate society. That's why they carry a huge responsibility."

Fighting climate change starts with fighting misinformation around it

Research has shown that the best way to counteract the politicization of science is to convey the high-level consensus among experts about the reality of human?caused climate change.

That's why Facebook's UK-based trial is putting short, corrective messages into posts containing climate-change misinformation.

These messages include information like the fact that 97% of the world's scientific community agree that global warming is real and caused by humans.

Behavior and communication experts from George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the University of Cambridge helped advise Facebook on how best to debunk such climate myths in a way that is tailored to the psychology of misinformation. Dr. Sander van der Linden is one of the experts behind the UK trial.

Also read: Indonesian Media Outlet Reports Doxing of Journalist to Police

"One common error that we often see media outlets make, for instance, is to prominently repeat the myth in an attempt to debunk it. But that tends to strengthen people's mental associations with the myths and people kind of forget about the correction," van der Linden, who is a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, told DW.

So instead of repeating the myths, they start by stating the facts. The next step "is not to argue with people over the specifics, but to actually show what's misleading about the presentation of a particular argument and what the underlying technique is."