Driving transparency, global cooperation, and policy initiatives to combat climate disinformation’s harmful effects.

In the fight against climate mis/disinformation and its use as a tool to sabotage climate action and democratic processes, government policies and platform policies have so far failed to curb this threat. Existing legislation is insufficient, and even the regulations that do exist are often poorly implemented.

Encouragingly, there’s potential for robust policies that protect the public interest and preserve free speech to emerge — but only if governments, platforms, and civil society work together toward this goal.

Our Policy Asks

Climate disinformation is deliberately used to sabotage the global, science-based movements working to stop climate change.

Around the world, polluting industries have bankrolled influence campaigns and vested interests have exploited political and informational uncertainty to spread false or misleading information about climate change.

As a result, fossil fuel companies and the petrostates have created a favorable political environment to continue using fossil fuels, delaying the transition to renewables and the move toward a green economy.

To pass strong climate policies and protect information integrity, we must overhaul the structures, business models, and incentives that create unsafe, unfair, and opaque communications systems — systems that currently prioritize profits over public safety.

Governments—and social media, advertising technology, and broadcast and publishing companies—should take these steps to identify the problem

Acknowledge industry-backed climate disinformation as a major threat damaging the information ecosystem, hindering climate action and policy, risking public safety and health, and further widening societal and political divides. The United Nations states that “The ability to cause large-scale disinformation and undermine scientifically established facts is an existential risk to humanity.”¹

Adopt a scientific and robust definition of climate disinformation— in line with the United Nations and UNESCO’s Global Initiative for Information Integrity²— that does the following:

Undermines public understanding of the existence or impacts of climate change, the unequivocal human influence on climate change, and the need for corresponding urgent action to reduce global-warming emissions (mitigation) and prepare for the current impacts and those we must expect (adaptation), according to the IPCC scientific consensus and in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Misrepresents scientific data, including by omission or cherry-picking, to erode trust in climate science, climate-focused institutions, experts, and solutions.
Falsely publicizes efforts as supportive of climate goals that in fact contribute to climate warming or contravene the scientific consensus on mitigation or adaptation, including greenwashing.

Social media, ad technology, and media companies should take steps to stop disinformation from spreading, including these:

Prevent the monetization of climate disinformation, ensuring that tech companies and climate-denying content creators do not profit from hosting or amplifying such content, and weakening the financial incentive for disinformer networks. Mitigation strategies should include efforts to reform and provide full transparency in the areas of advertisements, ad tech tools, and placements; revenue-sharing schemes with content creators; merchandising; and any other monetized activity on their products and services.

Implement platform-wide inoculation efforts to expose mis- and disinformation to increase the resilience of users to false or misleading content, and prioritize scientifically credible content.

Secure strong labor policies for content moderation staff, including fair pay, clear contracts, accessible mental health/counseling services, sustainable working conditions, and union representation.

Produce and enforce transparency, safety, equity, and accountability measures related to company use of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, especially regarding the potential to accelerate the spread of climate-specific and other disinformation.

Social media, ad technology, and media companies should be accountable via transparency measures, including these:

Producing, publicizing, and resourcing transparent plans to stop the spread of professionally spread climate disinformation, with yearly benchmarks detailing progress, including these elements:

Community content standards with accompanying monitoring and evaluation indicators.
An enforcement mechanism for violation of these standards, including downranking.
A plan to monitor and respond in all languages in which the company hosts content.
An up-to-date, publicly accessible, and functional ad library that captures all paid ads, including political and issue-based ads.
An explanation of any fact-checking processes.
A user-support system for flagging content that violates community content standards.
A commitment to a transparent dispute resolution mechanism to respond to users.
Strong labor standards for content moderation work.

Reporting on the prevalence of climate disinformation on their products and services, including (but not limited to) coordinated information operations, including those orchestrated by or affiliated with the fossil fuel lobby; repeat offender activity from commercial disinformers, fossil-backed media outlets, and other high-traction or “verified” accounts, state-sponsored influence efforts, and interference; and the enforcement of content moderation policies on their services.

Allowing researchers access to all data needed to conduct research that contributes to the detection, identification, and understanding of systemic climate disinformation risks, as well as to the assessment of adequacy, efficiency, and impacts of risk mitigation measures taken.