This is an important decision in the fight against disinformation. Twitter just announced a ban on climate ads on its platform. In a blog post published on the occasion, the network social insisted on explaining his decision. “We believe that climate denial should not be monetized on Twitter, and that falsely representative ads should not detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” he said.
Commendable Efforts to Combat Climate Change
And Twitter intends to take its task seriously and without prejudice. Since freedom of expression is important on the platform, the sorting will be done using authoritative scientific sources, in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations service that has been working on these topics for many years. This announcement was not made by chance, and Twitter made it on the occasion of Earth Day last Friday. Earth Day is an annual global event that mobilizes civil society towards a goal. protection environment. In the past, many scientists have sought to sound the alarm about misinformation online about climate change. Last year we made special mention of this report by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, one of the organizers of the Nobel Prize. Experts believed that the efforts and voluntarism of peoples could stumble upon a wall: false information is being spread on social networks. Owen Gaffney, one of the authors, who is also a member of the Equity Sustainability Center, warned in April 2021: “One of the biggest challenges humanity faces right now is our inability to distinguish fact from fiction. It undermines the democracies that son queue limits our ability to make the long-term decisions needed to save the planet. »