THE Climate Action Against Disinformation has ranked Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) as the least-performing among social media platforms due to its poor approach to curbing climate change misinformation.
The group disclosed this in its Climate of Misinformation report which examines the performance of Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and X on their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate information such as climate denialism.
X was ranked last due to its unclear policies against the spread of misleading information about climate change, according to the scorecard.
The Climate Action Against Disinformation is a coalition of more than 50 environmental groups, ad agencies, and other organizations.
Social media researchers have long expressed concern over the proliferation of climate change denial. They contend that tech platforms exacerbate issues like rising sea levels when they fail to assume a more proactive stance in removing deceptive content from their platforms.
“In the case of X/Twitter, Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report said.
The researchers said they reached out to X in preparing their report but did not get a response.
On the scorecard’s 21-point scale, X scored 1. The platform received its only point in the report for fulfilling one of the researchers’ requirements that platforms have an easily accessible and readable privacy policy. X was also the only platform that lacked a clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for higher review.
Pinterest scored the highest point on the scorecard (12 points). It was the only platform that had set out to define climate misinformation in detail in its community guidelines and the only one that releases an annual report on climate misinformation trends, the researchers said. Other platforms define misinformation in general, not specific to climate, they added.
It also got credit for banning the monetization of climate misinformation and for trying to protect the personal data of people who protest against fossil fuels.
Pinterest was followed by TikTok at 9 points, Meta at 8 points and YouTube at 6 points respectively. The scorecard didn’t measure all apps that sometimes fall under the umbrella of social media, but the researchers said they’ve held meetings with other tech platforms not covered in the report, including LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
Nurudeen Akewushola is a fact-checker with FactCheckHub. He has authored several fact checks which have contributed to the fight against information disorder. You can reach him via [email protected] and @NurudeenAkewus1 via Twitter.
