[✔️] September 21, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Twitter carries misinformation PDF, Sugar on poison - politics needs more physical effort

[R.Pauli]

/*September *//*21, 2023*/

/[ On the Misinformation Battle Ground //]/
*Twitter ranks worst in climate change misinformation report**
*Climate coalition cites Twitter’s lack of clear policies to stop 
incorrect information and confusion from Musk takeover
Nick Robins-Early
Wed 20 Sep 2023
A report ranking climate change misinformation gave Twitter (recently 
rebranded as X) only a single point out of a 21-point scorecard when 
assessing policies aimed at reducing inaccurate information – the worst 
out of five major tech platforms.

The Climate of Misinformation report by Climate Action Against 
Disinformation looked at Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter 
for their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate 
information such as climate denialism. The group, which is made up of 
dozens of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations 
including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, released the report to 
draw attention towards climate misinformation on major platforms and 
makes the claim that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in 
accelerating the spread of climate denial.
witter’s low rank in the survey was because it failed to meet almost any 
of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies, 
which ranged from having clear and publicly available information on 
climate science to having clearly articulated policies on what actions 
the company will take against the spread of misinformation. The report 
noted that billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of the company 
last year added to the confusion over how policies are enforced and how 
the company makes content decisions.

“Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about 
which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report stated.

Twitter received its only point in the report for fulfilling one of the 
researchers’ requirements that platforms have an easily accessible and 
readable privacy policy. Twitter was also the only platform to lack a 
clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for 
higher review.

Tech platforms have long struggled with creating effective or coherent 
policies on content moderation, while events such as the Covid-19 
pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election resulted in swaths of 
misinformation circulating online. Amid conservative backlash and labor 
cuts in the tech industry, many companies have also deprioritized 
content moderation and opened the door to potential surges in 
misinformation on their platforms.

Although the other platforms fared better, none ranked especially high 
on the report’s scale – Pinterest scored highest with 12 points out of a 
possible 21. Issues ranged from a lack of clear definitions of what 
constituted climate misinformation, failure to enforce existing policies 
in a transparent way and a lack of proof that companies apply these 
policies equally across different languages. None of the companies 
release public reports on how their algorithmic changes affect climate 
misinformation, according to the report.

The organization’s authors advocate for a number of changes to big 
tech’s policies, including establishing clear guidelines on climate and 
updating privacy policies to show when private data is being sold to 
advertisers that could be linked to the fossil fuel industry.
Although anti-misinformation groups such as Climate Action Against 
Disinformation have repeatedly advocated for big tech to make 
investments in their content moderation, the trend in the past year has 
often been the opposite. Musk has hollowed out Twitter’s moderation 
capabilities while reversing policies to allow for the targeting of 
transgender people as well as the spread of anti-vaccine falsehoods. 
YouTube also reversed its policy to allow for election denialism, while 
Instagram allowed anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr back onto 
its platform.
/[ see the document 
https://caad.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Climate-of-Misinformation.pdf 
]/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/twitter-x-musk-climate-misinformation-social-platforms 


- -

/[ clip from PDF document on measure of misinformation  ]/
*KEY FINDINGS*
See Further Explanation and Discussion sections for further detail.

    *· Pinterest* received the most points, proving that they’re leading
    the industry on policies that mitigate the spread of climate
    misinformation.

    *· YouTube, Meta, and TikTok *have made commitments to address climate
    misinformation on their platforms, but independent researchers
    demonstrate that policy enforcement is lacking.

    *· Twitter/X *received only one point—lacking clear policies that
    address climate
    misinformation, having no substantive public transparency
    mechanisms, and offering noevidence of effective policy enforcement.

    · 4 out of 5 platforms did not have a content moderation policy that
    includes a
    comprehensive, universal definition of climate misinformation.

    · Most platforms lack policies that address greenwashing.

    · Although TikTok has demonstrated intention to do so, no platform
    showed proof of equal enforcement of climate misinformation policies
    across languages.

    · 4 out of 5 platforms’ privacy policies were either difficult to
    read, did not explicitly prevent the sale/sharing of personal data,
    or both.

    · There’s a lack of algorithmic reporting from all platforms, and 4
    out of 5 platforms lackreporting on misinformation trends.

    · 2 out of 5 platforms lack effective public education tools on
    climate change and
    climate solutions, and public education tools like Facebook’s
    Climate Science Center have been proven to not effectively counter
    misinformation.

https://caad.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Climate-of-Misinformation.pdf



/[ NYT Opinion -  right direction, weak effort, politics needs more 
physics  ] /
*Biden’s Green Energy Money Is Sugar on a Poison Pill*
Sept. 19, 2023
By Lydia Millet

We’ve just had the hottest summer in recorded history, with runaway 
wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, ruinous floods from Slovenia, Sudan and 
Hong Kong to Vermont and Brazil. We’ve seen nearly half of the world’s 
ocean waters in a heat wave, having absorbed some 90 percent of the heat 
produced by our greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid those catastrophes a new report from Oil Change International, out 
Sept. 12, showed that despite its rhetoric on climate leadership, the 
United States accounts for one-third of planned oil and gas expansion 
across the globe between now and 2050 — more than any other nation.

President Biden, with both help and hindrance from Congress, has brought 
us federal funding for clean technologies. That’s a crucial step but 
brutally inadequate: If we keep drilling, pumping and using oil and gas, 
green-energy money will remain a sprinkling of sugar on a poison pill.

In advance of this year’s United Nations Climate Ambition Summit on 
Wednesday, Mr. Biden has made concessions to the environmental lobby, 
canceling oil and gas leases in high-profile Alaska refuges and 
reserves. Those gestures are welcome, but also easy. The more difficult 
and more essential task is to remove incentives for oil and gas 
companies to continue their frantic pace of production, transport and 
profiteering.

The president’s answer to the climate crisis has been, in one word, 
more: more money for solar and wind, sure! But also more oil production 
and more exports of planet-heating fuels. More of everything! It’s the 
path of least resistance. And after all, more is the American way.
But more won’t cut it with fossil fuels, whether we’re using them 
ourselves or selling them to other countries. U.S. crude oil exports 
have gone up almost 850 percent since an important export ban was lifted 
in 2015, and in 2023 domestic oil production will hit an all-time high. 
Cleaning up our domestic portfolio won’t mean much if we keep shipping 
out dirty fuels to be combusted abroad.

The race to decarbonize should be embraced as a race to emancipation and 
to a greater global peace. Fossils are currently subsidizing conflicts 
from Russia’s war against Ukraine to militias in Myanmar. In the United 
States, they also have a regressive influence, since the steep, local 
environmental costs of producing fossils are borne by frontline 
populations that are largely poor communities and those of color.

This means that the emerging fight against fossil fuel dominance is not 
a faint, symbolic echo of, say, the struggles for civil rights and the 
women’s vote, or of organized labor for fair treatment in the 1930s. 
It’s a fusion of the impulses behind each of these mass liberation 
movements, striving to unite the need for environmental justice with the 
need for racial equity, workers’ rights and an economic system that 
values the common good over narrow, elite interests. It asks our leaders 
to use science as the basis for policy — and for rational action. And it 
asks this not in the name of one group alone, but for all of us.

So far the United States is Goliath, not David. For the very first time, 
global leadership is naming and blaming fossil fuels for the crisis: 
while the Paris Agreement doesn’t even make mention of fossil fuels, 
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is now targeting them directly 
by welcoming only nations that will commit to no new fossil fuel 
development and to concrete transition and phaseout plans to speak at 
the climate summit.

With its enormous economic, military and political clout, America is the 
colossus that stands in the way of a planetary crackdown on emissions. 
Congress is deeply entangled with the fossil fuel industry, and in the 
short term will stay that way. In time, we can hope for its corruption 
to wane and a belated survival instinct to kick in. But at this pivotal 
point, when science tells us we have to peak emissions by 2025, the only 
way forward is through the executive.

President Biden can’t stop oil companies from drilling on private or 
state lands, which are the source of the vast majority of our current 
output, but he can phase out oil and gas production on public lands. And 
he can reinstate a ban on oil and gas exports from private lands. He can 
stop saying yes to all new oil and gas projects — including the planned 
Sea Port Oil Terminal off the Texas coast, intended to increase our 
exports — and more exploration and drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico.

He can declare the destabilized climate to be the emergency it is and 
stop the billions of dollars in fossil fuel financing invested abroad, 
which locks in decades’ worth of extraction. He can direct the 
Environmental Protection Agency to establish national limits for 
greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. He can end the Department of 
Energy’s fossil fuel financing programs and require that all new vehicle 
sales are zero-emission by 2030. He can prosecute polluters and 
utilities for the damages they cause under nuisance and fraud suits, as 
Gov. Gavin Newsom has just done in California, and bring antitrust 
violation suits against entities that obstruct the clean energy transition.

President Biden can do all of this. If he acts now with urgency and 
strength, he can replace the poison pill of carbon emissions with 
medicine. He can give us hope that the ones who come after us will not 
be subjected to summers of chaos that grow more ravaging every year.
/Ms. Millet is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, most 
recently “A Children’s Bible” and “Dinosaurs.”/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/opinion/climate-summit-2023-un.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/opinion/climate-summit-2023-un.html?unlocked_article_code=IH7U1feyno4r1Kve5LoEL4QhJPrKtJCgl6rS_ZF-kiPHCuBrvaoHcgs_zl5uXEYc_GIhnw7XI2xKtCGHo0MbESOljQJ3DYTiwZ4A9u2oXikmAzfvp2u1i1R2eytrKm19AwGaAC6bcvXWg_MxrSpVItbRtPLg6CmbwjBVlpSSU_As8bqAj9Y8Ke20UYD4b0IBmCYUEw5wMaK3evjhmzn1hRGZe4MKcHK927Ifx21mrf1-4f98scGot4KZKgVqOz6V7emD2C6T25im4Qsjuxg3JUJqRlbLFCJuGn4-O9XPIh-R5tH-oTiraWfrJ5O5owpadM2EtTCwfVp1P1ssGbd1Kg&smid=url-share



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*September 21, 1980 */
September 21, 1980: In a presidential debate between Republican Ronald 
Reagan and Independent John Anderson (President Carter did not 
participate), the latter endorses a "emergency excise tax on gasoline," 
which the former vehemently opposes. Reagan and Anderson also debate the 
merits of energy conservation, with Anderson backing strong 
energy-conservation measures.

(10:00--20:25)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1IIyh3yTsM


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