Highlights
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2024-11-04 16:16 Okay, well, what is the difference between misinformation and disinformation? So it’s all about intent, misinformation. It’s a mistake. You don’t know that you’re spreading false information and you might be doing it in good faith so you believe the piece of information that you’re spreading. It’s an accident. Disinformation is when you know it’s wrong and you spread it intentionally.
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2024-11-04 16:23 Yeah. So the five Ds of the new climate denial are downplay, delay, division, deflection and doomism. And someone who’s been on the receiving end of this evolving strategy is climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann, who created the Hockey Stick graph, a famous graph that first showed the spike in global temperature in the 20th century.
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2024-11-04 20:19 They’re literally firing out these things multiple times. Yeah, exactly. So they’ll have 50 accounts and send the same tweet from every single account. I think it was last year there was a really big Twitter X trend of hashtag climate scam. I think they found out that most of the activity there was bots and it was amplified by false activity, but it made it trend. So to an everyday user they’d see in the box there, oh, climate scam is trending. A lot of people must believe climate change is a scam.
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2024-11-04 20:19 t’s no longer just about saying that climate change isn’t happening. It’s more about spreading uncertainty about its causes, its speed and the solutions. We’ve heard of online attacks on climate scientist credibility and even personal abuse against them
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2024-11-04 19:57 I did have the chance to ask him about his journey because he said to me when we spoke that he started off as an environmentalist himself, but he says that when he started coming across leading figures in the climate denial movement, that he felt persuaded by their arguments and by their views, even though again, they are not necessarily based on fact.
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2024-11-04 20:20 Whose responsibility is it? Moderation and regulation on social media is expensive. Is it the social media companies that should pay for it, or should governments pay for it? Should they aid regulation for these companies? So there’s a few countries sort of trying with new misinformation disinformation policies. Australia’s got one going. The EU has something where they fine social media companies for spreading disinformation.
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2024-11-04 20:20 every social media company is kind of doing something different. So when you’ve got meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, what they’re doing is they’ve got this meta oversight board, which is an independent body which looks at new disinformation techniques and other issues with meta moderation, which is an interesting one and has been really successful in some cases for X Twitter, they have the community notes. So X users write in when they see something is false and that is then displayed under the tweet yout YouTube has something where it flags certain topics like climate change, vaccines, and it has a little information box down the bottom just to say, here’s some trusted sources.