A Climate Denial Video Has 6 Million Views. Facebook Doesn’t Care.

A two-minute video attacking the scientific consensus on climate change — made by infamous denier Marc Morano — is going viral.  While the Guardian has already thoroughly debunked the content of the video, it’s still making the rounds on social media.  On Tuesday, it had racked up over 100,000 shares and 6.3 million views on Facebook.

Even though the social media site has bragged about hiring third-party fact-checkers in many countries to cope with its fake-news problem, its approach to fake science remains obscure.  “I don’t know if they are even fact-checking science,” says Gordon Pennycook, a professor at Canada’s University of Regina who studies fake news and political bias.

John Cook, who focuses on climate misinformation as a professor of cognitive science at George Mason University, says he hasn’t heard of the social media giant flagging any climate denial content.  “Facebook’s fact-checking algorithms are a bit of a black box,” he tells Grist via email.  (The social media site did not respond to a request for comment.)

Instead, Facebook seems to be taking aim at lower-hanging fruit, by limiting the spread of sensational stories from websites known to peddle in falsehoods like Infowars and YourNewsWire.  “There’s a wide world of B.S., unfortunately,” Pennycook says.

But while fact-checkers focus on falsehoods akin to “Pizzagate,” fake science stories — which have the potential to influence public policy, health, and the future of the earth — can spread widely.  Anti-vaccine groups run rampant on Facebook, with hundreds of thousands of followers exposed to misinformation about health risks of immunization.  And the Flat Earth Society (don’t get me started), has more than 150,000 followers, although some of them (hopefully) follow the page as a joke.
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Worse, some of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers are known climate deniers themselves. The Weekly Standard, which was announced as a fact-checking partner in December, has called climate science “Dadaist science” and has critiqued climate action.  The fossil fuel-funded Heritage Foundation has espoused climate change denial for decades — and is now partnered with Facebook to investigate possible “liberal bias” in its operations.  As Joe Romm writes for ThinkProgress:  “This is indeed the fox guarding the henhouse.”

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