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- Twitter said on Friday it will ban ads that “contradict the scientific consensus” on climate change.
- It joins other tech companies like Meta and Google in pledging to block climate denial content.
- Critics have attacked these companies for not doing more to fight climate change deniers.
Twitter is the latest Silicon Valley giant to say it’s banning advertisements that go against widely-accepted research on climate change.
The social media platform said on Friday it’s now treating advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus on climate change” with the same rules that govern how it treats ads that touch on violence, profanity, or exploitative content.
“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post.
Twitter said it would consult information from authoritative sources, such as reports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to determine which advertisements should be banned. A Twitter spokesperson told Insider that it would rely on technology and human reviewers to enforce the policy.
As for dealing with users who post climate misinformation, the spokesperson said the company would share more in the coming months on how it plans to shape climate conversations on its platform.
With Friday’s announcement, which coincided with Earth Day, Twitter joined its Silicon Valley counterparts Google and Meta in rejecting advertisers that peddle misleading information about climate change.
In October, Google said it would prevent climate-change deniers from advertising or monetizing their content on its platforms, including YouTube.
That same month, Meta, which owns Facebook, pledged to step up its efforts to fight climate misinformation. But a February 2022 report from the watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the social media company failed to label around half of all climate misinformation posts on its platform as false.
The CCDH said that by failing to do the “bare minimum,” Meta was “exacerbating the climate crisis.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
On the same day as Twitter’s announcement, a consortium of environmental non-profit groups released a report criticizing Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok for not being transparent about how they’re tackling climate change misinformation.
According to the report, the groups “believe that transparency on climate dis/misinformation and accountability for the actors who spread it is a precondition for a robust and constructive debate on climate change and the response to the climate crisis.”
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