Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate activists are furious that Facebook’s new misinformation algorithm backfired and banned all their friends.
Facebook suspends environmental groups despite vow to fight misinformation
Facebook blames mistake in system for restrictions on groups including Greenpeace USA
Oliver Milman@olliemilman
Tue 22 Sep 2020 17.30 AESTFacebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform.
Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged “intellectual property rights violation”.
The suspended people and groups were all involved in a Facebook event from May last year that targeted KKR & Co, a US investment firm that is backing the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a 670km-long gas development being built in northern British Columbia, Canada.
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Many of the accounts have now been restored, but a handful are still blocked, with no fuller explanation coming from Facebook.
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The suspensions came just a few days after the social media giant said it was launching a “climate science information center” to counter widely shared but misleading posts that reject the established science of the climate crisis.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/22/facebook-climate-change-environment-groups-suspended
Clearly Facebook needs to add special exceptions to their climate misinformation algorithm, to prevent their system from accidentally blocking climate activists.
Google may have encountered a similar problem in 2017, when they apparently discovered applying an objective truth algorithm to climate studies frequently produced answers which did not align with the prejudices of google management.
Update (EW): Added a link to the 2017 post which described Google’s mishap with objective truth.
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Could it be caused by the high percentage of photoshopped images?
Nevertheless, I would have imagined that ‘Greenpeace’ would be hard coded to not reject, surprising.
Don’t misunderestimate the Ministry of Truth.
The biter, bitten.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/07/03/co2-coalition-responds-to-calls-for-facebook-censorship/?
“Climate Power 2020 recently published a letter signed by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, and 13 leaders of groups working to ban the fossil fuels that are the source of over 80 percent of U.S. and world energy. The letter calls on Facebook to shut down the page of the CO2 Coalition of 55 climate scientists and energy economists, and to censor posts of its members studies and articles on other users’ pages.”
https://www.climatepower2020.org/facebook-letter/
Facebook Must Stop The Spread Of Climate Misinformation
Who are Climate Power 2020? “Climate Power 2020 is an independently run project created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club.”
The prime mover is John Podesta, whose CAP receives funding from Facebook and from Zuckerberg and his wife separately, amongst many other billionaires and corporations, including, but not limited to the following: https://www.americanprogress.org/about/c3-our-supporters/
Granthams
Soros
Sandler Foundation
Rockefeller Family Fund
Hewlett-Packard,
Amazon.com
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Google (Al Gore has been a senior adviser to Google since 2001)
The Joyce Foundation (President Obama was a director of the Joyce Foundation as Senator Obama)
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Microsoft Corporation
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Rockefeller Family Fund
Schwab Charitable Fund (World Economic Forum)
The Facebook Oversight Board:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/06/facebook-oversight-board-freedom-expression-helle-thorning-schmidt-alan-rusbridger
Co-chair is Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Danish PM from 2011 to 2015. She was CEO of Save The Children International from 2016 until 2019 on a salary of £264,000 per year. Since 2019 she has been a Director of the major Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas.
She is also a member of the board of the International Crisis Group, along with George Soros and his son Alexander. In addition she is a member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, sister organization of the World Economic Forum, headed by Klaus Schwab, CAP donor.
Um…. what?????
Did I hear Obi wan Kenobi say something about a “disturbance in the farce”?
Hmmmm…. I started a project in 2013 that had cities in chaos and massive fires in the West, literally half the world set on fire, in 2019 — chaos everywhere. Something like Heinlein’s ‘Revolt in 2100″.
I was only off by one year. What in the blue-eyed world is going on here? I haven’t finished this thing yet, so it sits nice and tidy on my hard drive (and jump drives) . Does not yet appear anywhere on the net.
And now Greenpeace got bumped out of Facebook?????
Somebody please tell me what in the blue-eyed, blinkin’ world is going on?????
Sara,
One Rule to ring to them all and in the darkness bind them.
(Apologies to the memory of JRR Tolkein the genius).
I wonder if this will be a chink in their armor….?
So…….FB is now a publisher…..that’s interesting. Guess that protection statute is now violated and they’ll be open to all sorts of litigation. This should be fun to watch!
I was thinking about that, too, because if you publish a novel – which is fiction that may have a basis in the real world, as in “Moby Dick’ or “Tale of Two Cities” or “Doctor Zhivago”, or even pure fiction like “Red Planet’ – and its content doesn’t agree with FB’s ideology, and they refuse therefore to let you promote your product, they’ve opened a whole case of cans of worms for themselves.
This should be interesting.
None of it matters unless the people being censored actually do something about it. So far, they haven’t.
Calling the status of the current climate a “crisis” is alone unscientific.
The Misinformation Elitists have spoken.
It is a painful realization, discovering the results of applying reason and logic to ones own belief system.
“Facebook suspends environmental groups despite vow to fight misinformation”
I think they misspelled “because”.
Yet again exercising control over content – acting as a publisher – while continuing to claim they are a platform with the protections that come with that status.
When is someone actually going to do something about it? I see a lot of complaining but no action.
(And no, it can’t be me because I don’t use those platforms so have not been personally affected – no legal standing)
The SAME people who claim President Trump, or any elected official, can’t block others on TT will scream “FB is Zuck’s toy” “it’s a private entity” and “free market”, “suck it up” and “go elsewhere”.
Also: if a bakery can’t be forced to make a CUSTOM gay mariage cake (not the definition of bakery), when anyone LGBTQI can buy any cake on shelves, then a social network with a worldwide dominance can’t be expected to host user content (which is the definition of social network)…
If FB applied these key statements from the IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 2 on extremes, as summarized by Roger Pielke Jr. (http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/10/coverage-of-extreme-events-in-ipcc-ar5.html), most media outlets would have to be shut out.