On Thursday, Facebook announced it was taking new steps to assist fight local weather change misinformation on its platform, together with making a grant program to spend money on fact-checking initiatives price an entire $1 million {dollars}. (So beneficiant to throw the spare change you present in between your sofa cushions at this drawback, Mark Zuckerberg!)

It comes with a slew of different bulletins, however they’re window dressing on an actual drawback. A brand new report social media and the Texas blackouts launched the identical day exhibits Facebook is awash in local weather misinformation that a couple of tweaks gained’t repair. A staggering 99.1% of interactions on the highest social media posts pushing lies about wind vitality inflicting the blackouts occurred on posts with no reality test label.

“They’re moving deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michael Khoo, who runs the disinformation marketing campaign at Friends of the Earth, stated of the brand new insurance policies. “They’re not looking at the real problem of misinformation.”

In addition to $1 million Facebook pledged, the corporate additionally stated it would broaden the Climate Science Information Center it created final yr to assist fact-check posts on the positioning. Now, Facebook stated, the characteristic—which they’re renaming the Climate Science Center—shall be up to date with “additional features to better inform and engage our community on climate change,” together with new info about local weather change and quizzes to check customers’ local weather data.

A couple of Buzzfeed circa 2015-style quizzes and a mere $1 million from an organization presently valued at greater than $1 trillion doesn’t sound like a lot. And as the brand new report from Friends of the Earth illustrates, Facebook’s local weather misinformation drawback runs deep. The report seems to be at misinformation that unfold on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and different social media platforms within the wake of the Texas blackouts final February, six months after Facebook created the Climate Science Information Center and began fact-checking posts.

If you’ll recall, an picture of a frozen turbine unfold like wildfire on right-wing social media areas, erroneously labeled as a photograph of a Texas turbine in the course of the chilly snap. The lie that frozen generators prompted the blackouts was then broadly picked up by Republican politicians and speaking heads, fueled by local weather disinformation teams with ties to the oil and gasoline business. (The lie had actual political ramifications: Texas politicians pushed to financially hogtie renewable vitality in the course of the legislative session within the spring, claiming that their “lack of reliability” in the course of the blackout meant the state wanted extra monetary backing from these industries.)

The report notes that nationwide and native information retailers have been fast to debunk the picture. “Outlets generally don’t straight up print climate denial anymore,” Khoo stated. “But on social media, you can put up that image and it racks up millions of views. To me, that makes Facebook the last bastion of climate denial.”

Facebook did do some due diligence and mark posts with the wind turbine picture with a fact-checking label. The Friends of the Earth evaluation discovered that some 90% of the ten highest-performing posts with the precise picture of the turbine got a fact-checking popup, noting that the put up had “Partly False Information” and directing customers to fact-checked articles on the picture. But these posts, the evaluation finds, had comparatively little engagement, making up simply over 6,250 interactions—likes, feedback, and shares—between them.

Meanwhile, different posts containing misinformation however no turbine picture—like a post from Rep. Dan Crenshaw erroneously blaming wind generators and a post by Fox News linking to a Tucker Carlson phase on the generators—have been allowed to unfold to a lot bigger audiences with out reality test tags, producing a whole lot of 1000’s of interactions. Using Crowdtangle information on the top-performing Facebook posts, Friends of the Earth estimated that lower than 1% of customers’ interactions with the highest social media posts containing the false wind generators narrative contained a fact-checking label.

This quantity, Khoo famous, might really be bigger or smaller, as a result of Facebook doesn’t make its fact-checking metrics or different methods to counter misinformation—together with the way it decreases the circulation of false posts, a tactic it described in its announcement final yr—public. “This is the frustration: The denominator is the black box,” Khoo stated. “They say, ‘we de-emphasize the post,’ but it obviously doesn’t work because these numbers show it didn’t stop it from being widespread. This report is only based on what Crowdtangle can see, or what scanning through individual posts can see. There’s a much easier number, and they’re not giving it to us.”

“This report clearly states that our fact-checking partners quickly debunked false claims about the Texas storm and that we labeled ninety percent of the highest-performing posts containing a false wind turbine image,” a Facebook spokesperson stated in an e-mail. “Many of the examples in the report cited as not having labels are simply positions that the organization disagrees with. We’re connecting people to authoritative and up-to-date information about climate change through the Climate Science Center, and today we announced new features to further reduce misinformation on our platform.”

Facebook and different platforms, Khoo stated, could possibly be far more aggressive in how they method local weather denial on their platforms. Many of essentially the most proficient local weather denial posters, like Tucker Carlson, are repeat offenders. “I fully believe, and have argued to [Facebook], that you need to put a circle around them and advance suppress their discussion about climate change until they’re fact-checked,” Khoo stated. “This is not a freedom of speech issue—they can talk about climate change, they just have to talk about it accurately.”

Khoo additionally pointed to a research displaying that misinformation about the election dropped by more than 70% after Trump and different right-wing leaders have been booted off Twitter.

“I’m a big fan of deplatforming the known liars,” he stated. “You get rid of the liars, and guess what, you have fewer lies.”

Update 9/16/21 10:19 A.M. ET: This put up has been up to date with a remark from Facebook.