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Pinterest bans misinformation about climate change

NatMorton

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New York (CNN Business)Pinterest on Wednesday announced a new policy prohibiting users from sharing climate misinformation on its platform, making it the rare social platform to ban such content outright.

Pinterest, a service where users can bookmark and share visual posts, said it will remove content that denies the existence or impacts of climate change as well as the role of humans in causing climate change. It also plans to take action on false or misleading content about climate change solutions, content misrepresenting scientific data that could erode trust in experts, and harmful false or misleading content about climate change-related public safety emergencies. The platform will also ban ads containing false information or conspiracy theories related to climate change.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/06/tech/pinterest-climate-change-misinformation-policy/index.html

Because it will need to be said, Pinterest has every right to do this.

That said, this is, IMO, a mistake. The best approach would be some kind of warning label or brand that marks the information as suspect or otherwise considered false by most experts. What we learned with the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 is that suppressing "fake news" can lead to suppressing the truth. Twitter banned links to the NY Post's first reports on the laptop because its editors decided to believe the misinformation that the laptop was either stolen or Russian disinformation. We now know neither is the case.

Suppressing minority opinion is not good practice, ever.
 
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/06/tech/pinterest-climate-change-misinformation-policy/index.html

Because it will need to be said, Pinterest has every right to do this.

That said, this is, IMO, a mistake. The best approach would be some kind of warning label or brand that marks the information as suspect or otherwise considered false by most experts. What we learned with the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 is that suppressing "fake news" can lead to suppressing the truth. Twitter banned links to the NY Post's first reports on the laptop because its editors decided to believe the misinformation that the laptop was either stolen or Russian disinformation. We now know neither is the case.

Suppressing minority opinion is not good practice, ever.
A warning label is a nice idea on paper, but it's been shown that repeating disinformation, even if it's for the purpose of refuting it, has almost exactly the same effect in spreading the disinformation as doing so without the refutal.

It's much better to just block it altogether, or at least to place it in a category that's clearly aimed at highlighting the untruthful and ridiculous nature of the claim, such as DP's own conspiracy theory subforum.

As we deal with disinformation on all other matters, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, antivaxxerism and election-2020-trutherism, as a society we still haven't figured out how to tackle disinformation publicly without giving it the imprimatur of legitimacy. For now, the superior method is "shutting it down until we figure out what's going on."
 
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That said, this is, IMO, a mistake.
I disagree. If someone is getting their news from Pinterest they deserve to be censored.

The best approach would be some kind of warning label or brand that marks the information as suspect or otherwise considered false by most experts.
In all seriousness, I generally agree with this.
 
I don't visit sites that I don't like. Right wingers still have faux and kookburger conspiracy sites to keep them busy.
 
Who goes to Pinterest for medical information?
 
I guess I have to go sign up for Pinterest now so I can raise a fuzz over how I am going to leave the platform forever. As more and more platforms adopt a only information we like gets published approach the divide will only grow in our country.
 
I guess it's time for Trumpists and associated righties to bitch about how their "free speech" right to force companies to host their destructive bullshit.


I guess I have to go sign up for Pinterest now so I can raise a fuzz over how I am going to leave the platform forever. As more and more platforms adopt a only information we like gets published approach the divide will only grow in our country.

Not letting Trumpists spew incredibly divisive bullshit, right up to and including the sort that whipped them up into attempting a coup is what's divisive? Brilliant! Now you've cleverly pidgeonholed us into letting Trumpists tell destructive lies with abandon!

Or maybe it's just another lazy rip off of the RW tactic of claiming that the only *real* racism is found in efforts to fight racism.
 
I guess it's time for Trumpists and associated righties to bitch about how their "free speech" right to force companies to host their destructive bullshit.
Knew there would be someone dishonest enough to ignore the OP's opening line.
 
I guess it's time for Trumpists and associated righties to bitch about how their "free speech" right to force companies to host their destructive bullshit.

I am not saying that at all. These companies have every right to limit their platform to whatever content they wish. That is not in question or being debated by me.

Not letting Trumpists spew incredibly divisive bullshit, right up to and including the sort that whipped them up into attempting a coup is what's divisive? Brilliant!
What is divisive are people who are unwilling to hear any opinions except the ones they hold
Now you've cleverly pidgeonholed us into letting Trumpists tell destructive lies with abandon!
I’m not letting them do anything I don’t have a platform for anyone to post on. Plus I am not the arbitrator of rights their freedom to say stupid crap is protected. They are free to say it and no one is forced to publish or listen to it.
Or maybe it's just another lazy rip off of the RW tactic of claiming that the only *real* racism is found in efforts to fight racism.
Or maybe you just needed to meet your Trumpists quota for the day and went of on a tangent about what you wanted to be said versus what was really said.
Or maybe you just hate opinions that don’t echo your own.
Or maybe you were playing a game of charades and perfectly nailed hemorrhoid.
 
I am not saying that at all. These companies have every right to limit their platform to whatever content they wish. That is not in question or being debated by me.


What is divisive are people who are unwilling to hear any opinions except the ones they hold
sure
 
A warning label is a nice idea on paper, but it's been shown that repeating disinformation, even if it's for the purpose of refuting it, has almost exactly the same effect in spreading the disinformation as doing so without the refutal.

It's much better to just block it altogether, or at least to place it in a category that's clearly aimed at highlighting the untruthful and ridiculous nature of the claim, such as DP's own conspiracy theory subforum.

As we deal with disinformation on all other matters, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, antivaxxerism and election-2020-trutherism, as a society we still haven't figured out how to tackle disinformation publicly without giving it the imprimatur of legitimacy. For now, the superior method is "shutting it down until we figure out what's going on."
I think we should all be uncomfortable about major social media platforms or other public forums setting themselves up as unaccountable arbiters of truth like this. We should have been (and many of us were) uncomfortable even when it was aimed against misinformation about Covid or a 'stolen election,' but at least in those cases the reasonable justifications included the facts that
1) they were relatively new topics for which meaningful damage control might be effective,
2) they were fairly specific and short-term topics over a matter of years rather than decades and most importantly
3) they were directly related to saving lives and prevention of violence (in the latter case deplatforming Trump etc., at least).
A strong case could be made for the necessary evil of soft censorship in those cases, but none of those mitigating factors apply in the case of climate misinformation, and moreover as quoted in the OP it seems Pinterest plans on going beyond safeguarding the scientific facts to policing content about socio-political solutions to climate change as well.

Everyone agrees that those involved need to draw a line somewhere about what kind of content to deplatform and what to allow (and what algorithms should recommend versus what to keep more hidden). But if they're deciding to weigh in against even the socio-political side of such an indirect, broad and long-standing issue as climate change, it's not clear that Pinterest has considered any lines at all. It seems like a very worrying move if others follow suit and this becomes a new normal.
 
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I think we should all be uncomfortable about major social media platforms or other public forums setting themselves up as unaccountable arbiters of truth like this. We should have been (and many of us were) uncomfortable even when it was aimed against misinformation about Covid or a 'stolen election,' but at least in those cases the reasonable justifications included the facts that
1) they were relatively new topics for which meaningful damage control might be effective,
2) they were fairly specific and short-term topics over a matter of years rather than decades and most importantly
3) they were directly related to saving lives and prevention of violence (in the latter case deplatforming Trump etc., at least).
A strong case could be made for the necessary evil of soft censorship in those cases, but none of those mitigating factors apply in the case of climate misinformation, and moreover as quoted in the OP it seems Pinterest plans on going beyond safeguarding the scientific facts to policing content about socio-political solutions to climate change as well.

Everyone agrees that those involved need to draw a line somewhere about what kind of content to deplatform and what to allow (and what algorithms should recommend versus what to keep more hidden). But if they're deciding to weigh in against even the socio-political side of such an indirect, broad and long-standing issue as climate change, it's not clear that Pinterest has considered any lines at all. It seems like a very worrying move if others follow suit and this becomes a new normal.
Climate change is an existential crisis, and it was allowed to get to this point via decades of disinformation.
 
Climate change is an existential crisis, and it was allowed to get to this point via decades of disinformation.
Yes... and yes and no: It was allowed to get to this point because of lobbying and bribery from the fossil fuel, automotive, airline, construction and agriculture industries, and because of the tough choices that mostly pretty spineless politicians would have had to make otherwise, and while the decades of outrageous misinformation presumably helped ease any qualms of the contrarian far-right quarter of the population in all likelihood it was probably not really necessary for them. The actually feasible route to meaningful action would have been a sufficiently overwhelming public outcry and political organization from the rest of the population, and that was dealt with by the more subtle propaganda aimed at the center-right and at the folk who think that being between the far-right and center-right makes them 'centrists': Endless series of paper promises and commitments to renewables without ever actually keeping fossil fuels in the ground, for example, or advocacy for biofuels and electric cars rather than meaningfully reducing energy consumption, or merely offshoring industrial emissions to supplier countries like China through deliberate loopholes in the meaningless Kyoto Protocol, or promotion of so-called 'carbon offsets' and other accounting tricks, or above all a striking media silence relative to the actual scale of the issue.

Even trying to deal with the outrageous misinformation seems like trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point; but perhaps more to the point, even on the off chance that it would make some tiny difference to the number of people outright hostile to climate science, it's really not going to make a dent in all the propaganda used to encourage complacency or merely personal action from people who are simply indifferent and even most who are bit environmentally conscious. In the absence of political leadership, it's those latter groups whose serious engagement on the issue was required twenty or thirty years ago and is required even more now, but Pinterest's corporate virtue-signalling isn't going to make the slightest improvement there... and may even do harm.

Meanwhile, as I suggested, it's a very worrying development in terms of exchange of information generally; soft censorship on a broad socio-political subject with none of the mitigating circumstances which arguably justified similar measures on Covid and election misinformation.
 
This just part of a longer-term trend of course. Soft censorship in favour of China and other powerful interests have been going on for years, just business as usual. What's worrying now and with this Pinterest virtue-signalling is that it's becoming more open and openly-accepted. While probably none of us have worried too much about protection of the Chinese Communist Party or other stuff on the opposite side of the world or that doesn't really affect us, likely most of us if we'd heard would have at least said that we don't approve. But now after those specific Covid and election misinformation examples, there's a real danger of it becoming simply mainstream, accepted practice of 'open' access social media platforms regulating content in favour of powerful interests... and that's never going to be a good thing in the long run.

YouTube censorship actually works a lot like Chinese Communist Party censorship: the rules are vague and the enforcement is arbitrary. They want to encourage you to self-censor because you don’t know where the red line is.​

But it goes beyond YouTube. The Chinese Communist Party puts their censorship pressures on any company that does business in China. That in turn incentivizes those companies to censor on the Party’s behalf.​

Back in 2017, we had an Apple TV app for China Uncensored. Apple removed it from their app store in China, which we expected. But they also removed our app in Hong Kong, which they shouldn’t have done, because Hong Kong was supposed to be free from Chinese censorship. And the worst part is they even removed our app from Taiwan, a completely different country. We started an online petition and Apple eventually restored our app in Hong Kong and Taiwan.​
 
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