Despite a supposed ban on political advertising, Facebook is allowing a fossil fuel industry aligned group to spread disinformation claiming that renewable energy is to blame for the Texas blackouts.
That’s according to a new report by the watchdog group, InfluenceMap, which tracked how a right-wing institute, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has run a series of clearly political ads intended to spread lies about clean energy in the midst of the disaster.
In one ad, the Foundation urges people to “Thank Fossil Fuels” for keeping them warm during the blackouts. That’s despite the fact that according to energy experts, a leading cause of the blackouts was the failure of fossil fuels, especially methane gas, to function during the cold weather, along with poor grid management.
In another ad, the Foundation said the blackouts occurred because Texas has “replaced reliable fossil fuel electric generation and replaced it with wind projects that failed.” That’s an outright lie. The ad links to the Foundation’s “Life:Powered” website, an overtly political site that advocates for fossil fuel use and attacks President Biden’s “executive overreach” on environmental issues.
There’s no doubt that these ads violate Facebook’s policies on political advertising. It’s nearly impossible to run an ad on Facebook these days that even mentions the words “climate change,” but somehow this industry aligned group is able to run fossil fuel propaganda in the midst of a climate emergency? (As of Saturday morning, both ads are still up and running).
According to the team at InfluenceMap, the exception is a part of a disturbing trend of Facebook allowing fossil fuel aligned think tanks and front-groups to spread climate disinformation.
“Yet again, this shows that Facebook is not doing enough to prevent its platform being used to spread disinformation relating to climate change,” said InfluenceMap analyst Jake Carbone. “We have also seen Facebook fail to tag a number of climate related ads as ‘political or issue’ ads recently, which is a concerning trend. It means the extent of potential climate disinformation is likely to be much more significant on Facebook advertising than we can assess.”
That’s especially troubling, because the extent of disinformation that InfluenceMap has already revealed is shocking. In a report they released in October, the group identified 51 ads containing climate disinformation running during the first half of 2020. The ads were viewed about 8 million times during that six-month period.
Facebook is already under fire for spreading Trump’s “big lie” about a “stolen” election, but as journalist Emily Atkin has said, the original “big lie” on the right has always been climate denial. Facebook has said it’s committed to truth, transparency, and also climate action, but by letting fossil fuel industry aligned organizations spread climate disinformation, they’re polluting the public discourse just like the industry is polluting the atmosphere. Time to clean up their act.