Climate Denial Explodes as Social Media Stops Fact Checking

A Lie gets halfway ’round the world before the truth can get its pants on.
– not Mark Twain

The decision by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to end its fact-checking program and otherwise reduce content moderation raises the question of what content on those social media platforms will look like going forward.

One worrisome possibility is that the change could open the floodgates to more climate misinformation on Meta’s apps, including misleading or out-of-context claims during disasters.

In 2020, Meta rolled out its Climate Science Information Center on Facebook to respond to climate misinformation. Currently, third-party fact-checkers working with Meta flag false and misleading posts. Meta then decides whether to attach a warning label to them and reduce how much the company’s algorithms promote them.

Meta’s policies have fact-checkers prioritizing “viral false information,” hoaxes and “provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential.” Meta explicitly states that this excludes opinion content that does not include false claims.

The company will end its agreements with U.S.-based third-party fact-checking organizations in March 2025. The planned changes slated to roll out to U.S. users won’t affect fact-checking content viewed by users outside the U.S.. The tech industry faces greater regulations on combating misinformation in other regions, such as the European Union.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg specifically cited X’s Community Notes as an inspiration for his company’s planned changes in content moderation. The trouble is false claims go viralquickly. Recent research has found that the response time of crowd-sourced Community Notes is too slow to stop the diffusion of viral misinformation early in its online life cycle – the point when posts are most widely viewed.

In the case of climate change, misinformation is “sticky.” It is especially hard to dislodge falsehoods from people’s minds once they encounter them repeatedly. Furthermore, climate misinformation undermines public acceptance of established science. Just sharing more facts does not work to combat the spread of false claims about climate change.

Explaining that scientists agree that climate change is happening and is caused by humans burning greenhouse gases can prepare people to avoid misinformation. Psychology research indicates that this “inoculation” approach works to reduce the influence of false claims to the contrary.

That’s why warning people against climate misinformation before it goes viral is crucial for curbing its spread. Doing so is likely to get harder on Meta’s apps.