Will hatred and intolerance of alternate viewpoints in science trump free speech? Some would have it that way.
Via Climate NEXUS, a well funded daily newsletter run by a Madison Avenue PR firm.
Will Facebook Ban Deniers?
Breitbart brought our attention to a petition that calls on Facebook to ban climate change denial pages. With only 3,326 signatories out of a goal of 500,000, it doesn’t seem like the petition is going to accomplish its goal—and probably for good reason.
As bad as climate denial is, shutting them out of Facebook would justify their persecution complex, and might engender more sympathy for their position. Really, who treats Facebook as a place to discuss science? For the most part, we think denier groups are small enough that they pretty much serve as something to point and laugh at, because they’re not likely to be gain many converts when compared to the audience of Murdoch’s media empire.
That said, the petition actually has a point. Facebook doesn’t have too many rules, but the very last one reads that, “Pages must not contain false, misleading, fraudulent or deceptive claims or content.”
The question then, is whether or not claims that say global warming has stopped and an ice age is imminent, that climate scientists are fudging the data, or that Climategate showed wrongdoing would all fall under false, misleading and deceptive claims. We don’t know what else you would call them, so perhaps a ban would be warranted after all.
Though surprising, Facebook wouldn’t be the first social media site to crack down on climate deniers. In 2013, the science page of the social media giant reddit announced that any claims contradicting the consensus on climate change, evolution and vaccines must be supported by a peer-reviewed citation. Given that climate denial is almost never peer-reviewed, this resulted in a de facto ban on posts from climate change deniers.
Will Facebook follow suit? Probably not. But under their rules, it sounds like they could.
Sidenote: in the same Climate NEXUS issue, this is what they claim are “respectful” suggestions for the next Heartland conference
While it is probably true that Facebook is not a great form for discussing science, I believe that it is a huge mistake to allow inaccurate or misleading statements about science, especially climate science, go unchallenged. Since I live in Massachusetts, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who seemed to have uncritically accepted the standard catastrophic climate change story. When they post something that is wrong, incomplete or misleading, I try to provide reliable sources that address the issue. Silence is consent.
“Silence is consent” is right. In this case they are on a mission to be right. When being nice (from their perspective) fails, then things will start progressing in a more dangerous direction. If we don’t stop this now, it will get out of hand until someone will have to declare martial law in an effort to “restore peace.”
95% of the content on FaceBook would fall could of their content laws, most people use it to pretend they have a better life than they actually do…
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Indeed. A late friend used to call it “BitchBook”.
Fraud is deception for financial gain- that’s illegal. Most lying is not fraud- it’s just the vaseline of social intercourse.
Good quote from Gandhi. Thanks.
If they banned all nonsense, lies, and personal attacks on FaceBook and other blog sites, it is pretty evident 99% of comments will be censored because that is the numbr that are pure garbage. The name calling/ Arguments by Intimidation are so plentiful you could grow mushrooms in the b.s.
The Flat Earth Society has a Facebook group. Facebook has groups and individuals promoting homeopathy, psychics, fortune tellers, vaccine opposition, fad diets, different religions (which can’t all be true) and so on. I do not think Facebook could even begin to ban such items based on evaluations of their truthfulness (nor would I support efforts to do so). There is no way to draw the line once you start down that path.
The numbers are small and hopefully it is and remains a very limited group promoting this frightening idea. But it shows that there are some whose environmental fears will over-ride most any other value or consideration.
I don’t believe that “Hamlet” is true, but I find it stimulating to discuss it.
Mosey on over to the NOAA FB page. The federal government agency itself is promoting fascism under the guise of science.
I never used my FB account until today. Per your info, I have now posted several time to the NOAA FB articles (I was polite, but factual) – they won’t like me. Maybe I’ll get an IRS audit.
Well a ban would be fine. Then we could sue them and they have to prove that the content is false.
Suddenly all the money Facebook have would be spent on an experiment proving IPCC wrong!
An experiment ordered and overseen by the court.
That would be the end of it.
Who treats Jon Stewart as a place to get their news? Millennials. Welcome to the twenty-first-century idiocracy.
+10
I am not sure who has lost the argument. At the recent G7 meeting, there were a whole bunch of important things that the government leaders could not agree on so they issued a strong statement about how they are all fighting climate change. It has become so non-controversial and a way to show they are really all friends. I am concerned that it is when something is no longer interesting and no-one is taking any notice that the politicians and bureaucrats start to take the big irreparable actions. I cannot see what would change this – as we saw only a few days ago, it would need the pause to go on for another 50 years before one influential organisation started to question its thinking. It is very hard to prove a negative. What is going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years to stop this?
Pat – Your question:
“What is going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years to stop this?”
My answer:
Maybe global cooling?
The CAGW diehards will be shouting through the icicles hanging from their frostbitten nostrils: “Skeptics and Deniers Repent. The heat is hiding in the deep ocean and will emerge tomorrow and were all going to fry!”
I am out to save the world precisely by stopping this. They have crashed the global economy by 10-25%, destroyed some of mankind’s most precious archaeological treasures with a dam in Turkey, killed thousands of Arabs in the Arab Spring riots(food riots stemming in what corn ethanol did to their food prices) and threaten actual extinctions of birds with their windmills.
Science won’t cut it. They are profoundly anti-scientific. We still need to promote the scientific method and the facts, but this is a small part of what it will really take to save the world.
I believe the main thing is to take advantage of where they are right. Many of them are getting into “soil sequestration” of the “excess” carbon dioxide. Now, the facts are that even 400 ppm CO2 is still CO2 starvation. But sequestration of carbon in the soil is soil enhancement. This is a very positive thing. Improving soil fertility is something we can all agree on. By focusing attention on it, everyone wins, and the intensity of frustration of not being able to persuade others to your own point of view will be abated.
I have a seldom used FB account under an alias. Now they want a phone number to prove that I’m real. Sorry boyz, mebbe when I get a burn phone. I’m very careful with my identify and see nothing wrong posting anonymously. After 30 years on the Internet, all I need is more SPAM.
+10
Not only a phone number but passport, drivers license, utiliy bill with an address etc etc etc to prove who I am and yet, my profile *DOES* “prove” who I am and the name people know me by (A nickname). So I opened up case with FB to ask why this new policy given I’d been using FB for years. I got various e-mails from various “support staff” pointing me to their policy page. I asked, who do I know who you are? Can you prove to me that you are who you say you are given you are asking for prooof of ID (As above), no answer. New police on the block.
So yes, still waiting for FB to delete (AT my request) the account as I constanly get spam.
If that happens Facebook, at worse, will lose about 1/3 of its user base, then, the company that now trades at 115 times earnings, making it the worst bubble-mess in tech, will be forced to rebate on paid messages, probably to the extent that they’re digging into investor cash, not revenue based cash flow. At that point the stock goes into a death spiral, Zuckerberg and Sandberg will be shown the door.
This is the same kind of thing that happened to Newsweek when their liberal editorial board decided it was time to be pro-active on issues, instead of doing real investigation and reporting. We know how that ended up, it left them with an NYU gossip reporter as the chief science correspondent.
“If that happens Facebook, at worse, will lose about 1/3 of its user base” –
Only if there is a viable alternative that people will actually USE. Until then, FB can do just about anything it wants.
Read this page from ClimateNexus – aka “how to perpetuate the climate scam using social media”
http://climatenexus.org/messaging-communication/communication-basics/social-media-guide
I’m on Facebook a lot, carpet bombing (got me tossed from HuffPo) MSM, academia, & high profile believers, and ignore the half dozen who hassle me w/ standard talking points from the clipboard hanging in their minimum wage call center cube farm. I do it trusting that somebody unknown will see it, pick up my thread and give it a tug. Hammer, hammer, hammer. CAGW is much like cold fusion and WMDs.
Without an opposing view or voice, we we either have fascism or are completely dillusional.
That is the truth, and it looks like we have both.
Truth is irrelevant. We need consensus, for the sake of diversity.
Curious:
And we need uniformity to get consensus.
Have you gentlemen been reading 1984 as a political manual again? (I know you are being sarcastic and don’t believe the words, but are expressing an obvious cultural observation of the spirit of the times. – scary)
“Pages must not contain false, misleading, fraudulent or deceptive claims or content.”
Maybe facebook just should ban all statements about the future. Since they’re universally neither true or false at they time they’re written, if they express any kind of certainty they’re misleading.
Once I told a friend that I was going to go see his shitty band play and I most definitely didn’t do that. A policy against future related statements could have prevented me from the awkward social need to lie.
Facebook is a fitting place for AGW Alarmism. Vanity, wasting time and being a part of cliques. That’s pretty much what both FB and AGW are about. Normal people shed these behaviors somewhere between the ages of 13 and 19.
While I believe in free speech and free internet, I don’t think there was any net gain for humanity by the invention of Facebook. The problem with having a rational discussion about climate change with a regular person is the issue of academic/elite authority. Most regular people and even environmentalists are not going to take the time to research the science of climate change. The consensus of scientists spewed by the main stream media constantly is just too much of a barrier to get past. This is the main issue with informing the masses on climate change. The truth about the consensuses and scientific agreement must come out sooner or later. Without that the whole movement will have to go down in a blaze to convince these people.
Do not mistake CAGW for a movement. It is a well oiled money machine.
Look at the discussion I am having with NOAA on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/NOAAClimateGov/posts/855005737927466?comment_id=857519851009388
They refuse to discuss anything that disagrees with their conclusions and then threaten people to being banished if they do disagree with their conclusions. The official scientific argument they propose is that the science is settled and there is no time to question it. One guy was banished in that very thread for no other reason than asking questions that NOAA did not want to answer.
David: Strange comment from NOAA (but then, I don’t do FB or Twatter): Surely, climate changing is a symptom of AGW? As in, we note that the climate is changing; what is the possible cause? Ahh, say NOAA, AGW.
It’s much worse than that. In the article that started this discussion, there is a paragraph header that reads, “A Climate Change Unlike Any Other.” Then immediately underneath it there is a graph that shows the present climate change is nearly identical to the past four Ice Age cycles, except the current cycle is a bit weaker.
Their next graph shows just a portion of the current cycle that best fits their narrative.
They acknowledge there has been climate change of the same order during the past 500,000 years, and say, “Previous warming episodes were triggered by small increases in how much sunlight reached Earth’s surface and then amplified by large releases of carbon dioxide from the oceans as they warmed (like the fizz escaping from a warm soda).” …As though they were there and they know the exact mechanics of these huge cycles! NOAA can’t even get the weather forecasts accurate to within three days, let alone know the exact mechanisms from thousands of years ago and into the future 100 years.
David…I didn’t see your name in the comments – have you been erased?
Since the writing’s been on the wall for awhile about AGW, they changed the meme to “climate change,” weasel-words that can mean anything they find it convenient for them to mean–up, down, sideways, here, there, whatever happens next week. Volcanoes and earthquakes even! The general public has now achieved uncritical mass in their scientific illiteracy, becoming in effect the very useful idiots necessary to perpetuate this nonsense profitably–and probably indefinitely.
You’re probably talking to a computer with pre programmed answers.
If I show a plot of the RSS lower troposphere temperature measurement and say there has been no statistically significant trend up or down for the last 15 years, I am labeled a denier. We all know if anyone bans “climate denial” that is the type of data and factual statement they want to ban. If Facebook banned climate denial then 95% of those who signed that petition would want that type of data and that type of factual statement about the data to be banned. Even though it does not meet the Facebook rule about false statements not being allowed. The only statement is irrefutable about global warming is that increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has the effect of reducing the Earth’s ability to radiate heat to space. Deny that and you are a denier. It is not a fact that we know what will happen to global temperatures if we keep adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, that implies we know for a fact all the other impacts to the global thermal environment, feedback, solar fluctuation impacts, etc, and that we know for a fact what the net result of all those impacts will be.
Yes, CO2 acts to reduce heat into space. However, that does not mean there aren’t other mechanisms that can radiate heat into space. Hurricanes and large thunderstorms have enormous heat columns that rise from their center. When the warm, moist air punctures the troposphere and billows into the stratosphere, the heat is radiated as infrared light. The resulting cold moist air freezes as hail and falls back to Earth, thus the mechanics of an updraft storm pumps heat off the Earth like an air conditioner. The warmer the oceans and surface waters get, the stronger and more numerous the convection cells that radiate heat.
One of Monckton’s favorite displays is a set of 18 graphs, 17 of the climate models’ prediction that Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) will reduce (by”trapping”) as CO2 warms the surface, and one of the actual satellite measurements, showing OLR rising in lockstep with surface and atmospheric warming.
BTW, Willis Eschenbach develops a “governor” theory that describes your mechanism in the tropics as a band of thunderstorms that follows the sun around the equator daily. Also, Bill Gray has a paper out documenting the action of thunderheads in putting dried air aloft vs. the humid air the models require. The consequence is a reduction by about 10X of the “Climate Sensitivity” to a doubling of CO2, to about 0.3K. The destruction of the whole AGW hypothesis. http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
It sounds as if they think that climate “deniers” are spouting false science, when they should be wary of the junk and false science of the pro-global-warming-by-man people. What a shame to ban people who only want the truth out there and keep those who would mislead the public while pursuing a political, entirely unscientific agenda.
Yes, and it goes to show that there are people around who despise free speech and seek to put those who disagree with their “settled science” under ‘virtual’ house arrest.
People who gather all they currently “know” through social media, whether that be FB or instagram or whatever, will be a perpetual problem. However, I have an ex-friend, who I unfriended in the old way by refusing to have anything more to do with him. He grew up in a solid left-Democrat household, Ph.D.s in history and religion, and tells me that “freedom of speech” is allowed only for those who tell the “truth”.
I tried to point out to him the many levels of fallacy his viewpoint involves to no avail. How are the mal-informed hordes at FB any more of a problem than this guy?
well even with my limited vocabulary and basic education I see a problem…mostly fear of a what if scenario that will take lifetimes and generations to substantiate…either way cooling or warming….in an ever changing place like Earth it would be easy for anyone to exploit temporary shifts or trends in a climate and deem it mankind’s fault…everything they propose is either unsustainable or just outright wrong…believing you can control mother nature is just simple ignorance maybe leftover from the last extinction event 😉 heck if I know what their damn problem is
Climate Fact Check needs to replace denier labels. At least that’s how things work in la la advocacy land where labels are everything.
Judging from my latest foray into Facebook and the number of failed wall posts I must have achieved persona-non-grata status. Do I get a certificate or something?
Why dont we play them at their game. When they make claims about extreme weather on facebook. Lets get em banned.
They take facebook a little more cereal than we do.
You cannot be serious!
The word “denier ” is so childish. I prefer to just refer to those who haven’t yet seen the pause.
“For the most part, we think denier groups are small enough that they pretty much serve as something to point and laugh at,…”
“With my only 3,360 signatories out of a goal of 500,000…”
Hmmm…
Here are a few of my favorite quotes about the importance of skepticism and the danger of politicizing science: