The climate coalition highlights Twitter’s absence of clear policies to prevent misinformation and confusion resulting from Musk’s takeover
In a climate change misinformation report, Twitter (recently rebranded as X) received only one point out of a 21-point scorecard, ranking the lowest among five major tech platforms. The Climate of Misinformation report, conducted by Climate Action Against Disinformation and involving organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, assessed Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter for their content moderation policies and efforts to combat inaccurate information, particularly climate denialism. The report aims to highlight climate misinformation on major platforms, asserting that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in amplifying the spread of climate denial.
Twitter’s position in the survey resulted from its failure to align with nearly all of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies. These criteria encompass having transparent and publicly accessible information on climate science, along with clearly defined policies outlining the actions the company will take against the dissemination of misinformation. The report highlighted that Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company last year contributed to the confusion surrounding policy enforcement and content decision-making.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has introduced uncertainty regarding the status of standing policies,” the report emphasized.
Twitter earned its sole point in the report for meeting one of the researchers’ criteria: having an easily accessible and comprehensible privacy policy. Notably, Twitter was the only platform lacking a clearly defined reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for higher-level review.
Tech platforms have long grappled with the challenge of formulating effective and coherent content moderation policies. Events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election led to widespread circulation of misinformation online. Amid conservative backlash and labor cuts in the tech industry, many companies have deprioritized content moderation, potentially paving the way for increased misinformation on their platforms.
While other platforms performed better, none achieved a particularly high ranking on the report’s scale. Pinterest secured the highest score with 12 points out of a potential 21. Challenges included a lack of clear definitions for climate misinformation, failure to transparently enforce existing policies, and insufficient evidence that companies consistently apply these policies across various languages. The report highlighted that none of the companies disclose public reports detailing how algorithmic changes impact climate misinformation.
The organization’s authors advocate for several changes to big tech’s policies, such as establishing clear guidelines on climate issues and updating privacy policies to disclose when private data is sold to advertisers with potential ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Despite the persistent advocacy from anti-misinformation groups like Climate Action Against Disinformation for significant investments in content moderation by big tech, the trend over the past year has frequently been the opposite. Musk has depleted Twitter’s moderation capabilities and reversed policies to permit the targeting of transgender individuals, along with the dissemination of anti-vaccine misinformation. YouTube also reversed its policy to allow election denialism, and Instagram readmitted anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr to its platform.