Twitter is the latest Silicon Valley giant to declare openly that it would prohibit advertisements that oppose widely accepted scientific agreement on climate shift.
Advertisers glancing to use unscientific dialect about climate transformation in their postings on Twitter are about to be out of luck. The social media goliath is now prohibiting all climate transformation denial ads from its outlet.
In a blog post on Earth Day that was published on Friday, in which the company states that any advertisement featuring claims about climate change that oppose the scientific consensus will be considered unsuitable and will also be prohibited.
“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ad shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company wrote.
Twitter said that it would discuss data from powerful sources, such as reports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to specify which advertisements should be prohibited or which should not. A Twitter spokesperson told Insider that it would be sure of technology and human analysts to execute the protocol.
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The world needs to work now to decrease greenhouse gas emissions- IPCC report
The latest IPCC report released earlier this month said that the world needs to work now to decrease greenhouse gas emissions across all regions to limit global warming to the critical temperature change of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Last year, in an endeavour to help users find reasonable information on climate change, the company unfolded a dedicated climate change Topic, along with centres of reasonable information in the Explore tab, Search, and Trends sections of the site. The release of the centres overlapped with the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Meeting.
The news came at a time when the company was trying to avoid take-over on Twitter by the billionaire Elon Musk. Musk has been significant of Twitter’s temperance methods in the past, tweeting that platform is a “de facto town square” where “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
Such preservation for free speech, under the First Amendment, pertains only to the government censoring speech.
It remains ambiguous if his feelings relate to paid advertisements, as well as tweets from people.
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.
Google & Facebook seem to be thinking along the same lines
In October, Google said that it would prevent climate-change deniers from publicity or revenue from their content on its platforms, encompassing YouTube.
Before Friday, Twitter said that it would reject or halt ads under its inappropriate content policy of denying climate change and it has now formalized the procedure.
Meta, which owns Facebook, vowed to increase its accomplishments to fight climate misinformation in the same month. But a February 2022 report from the watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the social media company lagged to label around half of all climate misinformation posts on its outlet as false.
The CCDH said that by flunking to do the “bare minimum,” Meta was “exacerbating the climate crisis.”
Facebook did not instantly respond to Insider’s request for the statement.
On the same day when Twitter announced, a group of environmental non-profit groups released a statement criticizing Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok for not being transparent about how they’re enterprising climate change misrepresentation.
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.”
