Facebook, accountable only to its investors, now intends to pose as a proxy authority on the world’s present and future climate. But the author of the article below wants Facebook to go further and impose its own views on people, while hiding behind the usual catch-all accusation of ‘climate change denialism’ but offering no definition of it. Presumably suggesting that a carbon dioxide level of 0.04% in the atmosphere might not be a massive climate problem is beyond the pale, and should be suppressed? Without clarity about what is out of bounds in discussion, the risk of unfair censorship is obvious.
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Even as Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, admits that climate change “is real” and that “the science is unambiguous and the need to act grows more urgent by the day” the platform appears unwilling to take steps to really stand up to the climate change denialism that circulates on its platform, says Techcrunch.
The company is set to achieve net zero carbon emissions and be supported fully by renewable energy in its own operations this year.
But as the corporate world slaps a fresh coat of green paint on its business practices, Facebook is looking to get out in front with the launch of a Climate Science Information Center to “connect people with science-based information.”
The company is announcing a new information center, designed after its COVID-19 pandemic response. The center is designed to connect people to factual and up-to-date climate information, according to the company.
So far, Facebook says that more than 2 billion people have been directed to resources from health authorities with its COVID-19 response.
The company said that it will use The Climate Science Information Center to feature facts, figures and data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their global network of climate science partners, including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and others.
This center is launching in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. to start.
While Facebook has been relatively diligent in taking down COVID-19 misinformation that circulates on the platform, removing 7 million posts and labeling another 98 million more for distributing coronavirus misinformation, the company has been accused of being far more sanguine when it comes to climate change propaganda and pseudoscience.
Full article here.
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via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
September 16, 2020 at 05:18AM
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