X, Formerly Twitter, Ranks Lowest in Climate Change Misinformation Report Among Major Tech Platforms

Twitter, which recently rebranded itself as X, has come under scrutiny in a report that assesses its policies regarding climate change misinformation. The report, titled "Climate of Misinformation," was conducted by Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. The aim of the report is to shed light on climate misinformation present on major tech platforms and to underscore the role that these platforms play in amplifying climate denialism.

In the report, Twitter received a dismal score, earning just one point out of a possible 21-point scorecard. This places Twitter at the bottom among five major tech platforms evaluated, which also included Meta (formerly Facebook), Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. The assessment focused on content moderation policies and efforts to combat the spread of inaccurate climate information.

Twitter's low ranking in the report is attributed to its failure to meet nearly all of the criteria set by the organization for climate misinformation policies. These criteria ranged from having clear and publicly available information on climate science to having well-defined policies on how the company would respond to the dissemination of climate misinformation. The report also pointed out that Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter last year had added to the confusion surrounding the platform's policies and enforcement of those policies.

Twitter managed to score its single point for having an easily accessible and readable privacy policy. However, it was the only platform among those assessed that lacked a clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for further review.

While the other platforms evaluated performed better than Twitter, none received particularly high scores on the report's scale. Pinterest received the highest score with 12 points out of a possible 21. The issues raised by the report included a lack of clear definitions of climate misinformation, inadequate enforcement of existing policies with transparency, and insufficient evidence that these policies were consistently applied across different languages. Additionally, none of the platforms released public reports detailing how their algorithmic changes impacted climate misinformation.

The authors of the report called for several changes in the policies of major tech companies. These changes included establishing clear guidelines on climate-related issues and updating privacy policies to disclose when private data is shared with advertisers connected to the fossil fuel industry.