The founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, southern Germany, on February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
Facebook on Monday night announced it will launch a new information hub to provide its users with “science-based information” about climate change. It said a link to the hub will appear when people search for information related to climate change on Facebook, or when people see certain posts related to the subject.
The climate change hub comes after the company dealt with a rash of misinformation across its services regarding the cause of the wildfires raging across the Western U.S. One article containing false information blaming the wildfires on antifa arsonists had been shared more than 63,000 times on Facebook, according to The Guardian.
The new feature is called the Climate Science Information Center, and it will provide Facebook users with facts, figures and data from factual sources, the company said in a blog post. These sources include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.N. Environment Programme, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, World Meteorological Organization and the Met Office.
In addition to the information center, Facebook said it will continue to reduce the distribution of posts containing false information on its News Feed feature and it will label those posts as false. Facebook, however, did not say it would remove those posts. The company also did not say if it would remove or label posts within private Facebook groups that contain misinformation about climate change.
This year, the company has deployed information centers as a tactic to combat the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. The company launched a Covid hub in March, and in August, Facebook rolled out a voter information center.
Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center will go out to users in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany at launch, and it will appear in more markets “soon,” the company said.
