Twitter has announced that it will no longer allow advertisers that deny the scientific consensus on climate change to advertise on its platform, mirroring a policy already in place at Google.
“Advertisements should not detract from vital dialogues about the climate catastrophe,” the business said in a statement released on Friday.
There was no evidence that the move would have an impact on what users write on social networking sites, which, like Facebook, has been targeted by groups aiming to spread false climate change claims.
The announcement, which coincided with Earth Day, came only hours before the European Union agreed to a pact requiring big tech companies to do more thorough reviews of their sites for hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content.
Twitter said it would share additional details in the coming months about how it plans to provide “reliable, authoritative context to the climate dialogues” its users are having, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The studies of a United Nations-backed science group on the causes and impacts of climate change serve as the foundation for international climate change negotiations.
The company already has a dedicated climate topic on its site and offered what it described as “pre-bunks” during last year’s U.N. climate conference to counter misinformation surrounding the issue.
Still, research shows that climate change denial groups have managed to evade social media companies’ content moderation systems to spread falsehoods about the environment such as there is no evidence of the adverse effects of climate change. A 2021 report by the liberal-leaning advocacy group Avaaz found that between April 6, 2021, and Nov. 15, 2021, the top five climate change misinformers managed to rack up more than 60 million views on posts containing climate falsehoods — most of which were not labeled by Facebook as false.
