A new report has shown that big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter are profiting from social media ‘greenwashing’ campaigns that promote misinformation and disinformation about the climate crisis.
Using data from Global Witness, climate misinformation campaign group, Stop Funding Heat, claims that greenwashing is growing online as businesses continue to falsely publicise efforts as supportive of climate goals whereas they are contributing to climate warming.
Recently, Global Witness claimed that data shows British fossil fuel company BP more than doubled its spending on greenwashing advertisements on Facebook and Instagram in the first seven months of 2022 alone compared to the previous year.
This new claim is coming a year after the introduction of the ‘Green Claims Code’ by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), that aims to reduce greenwashing activity to protect consumers.
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According to the group, their data shows that Shell continued to run ads on Instagram and Facebook that greenwash its image and allegedly bypassed the platform’s labelling requirements for political content.
Stop Funding Heat is alleging Big Tech platforms of having no policies in place to address greenwashing, and suggests introducing tobacco-style advertising bans for the fossil fuel industry and their lobbyists and subjecting fossil fuel adverts to more rigorous checking procedures.
“With a growing international movement to halt greenwashing and prevent the promotion of climate misinformation, these Big Tech platforms are on borrowed time.
“We are already seeing some regulators begin to crack down on greenwashing from large polluters, while a number of cities and towns are introducing bans on the advertising of climate-wrecking products.
“Big Tech needs to get its house in order and tackle greenwashing and climate misinformation instead of continuing to profit from it amid a climate crisis,” Sean Buchan, campaign manager at Stop Funding Heat and author of the report was quoted as saying.
However, a Shell spokesperson in reaction to the claim said the company is investing billions of dollars in lower-carbon energy and added that customers need to know through advertising or social media what lower-carbon products and services the company offers now or are developing, so they can make a choice that is right for them as“he world will still need oil and gas for many years to come. Investment in them will ensure we can supply the energy people will still have to rely on while lower-carbon alternatives are scaled up as that demand grows.”
A spokesperson for Meta, which encompasses Facebook, said: “While ads like these run across many platforms, including television, Meta offers an extra layer of transparency by requiring ads about environmental topics to include a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer.
“We reject ads when one of our independent fact-checking partners rates them as false or misleading and take action against Pages, Groups, accounts, and websites that repeatedly share content rated as false.”
The report’s findings come at a time of growing international momentum to tackle the issue of greenwashing. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called out fossil fuel companies for greenwashing and promoting climate misinformation. Guterres noted that fossil fuel companies have behaved “just like the tobacco industry”, riding “rough-shod over their own science”.
Alice Harrison, Fossil Fuels Campaign Leader at Global Witness, sais that it was utterly disingenuous for big polluters like BP and Shell, whose main business is in climate-wrecking fossil fuels, to pretend that they are green.
According to him, these are the same companies that have bankrolled climate denial groups for years and have now simply swapped tactics under pressure from an increasing climate consensus.
“Denial has morphed into deception and delay,”he aaid. “They’ve proven that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing – they now must be forced to comply and face serious consequences for failing to do so,”.
Story was adapted from the Independent.
