Not Breaking News: Fox News is a misinformation platform
Over the past week (6/14 to 6/21) over 8 million people were exposed to climate misinformation on Twitter alone.
In this space each week, triplecheck will share information on the climate misinformation we’re seeing online – what’s going viral, how many people are seeing it, and who’s responsible for moving it. triplecheck was initiated by the Climate Action Campaign and was created to develop innovative tools to help fight misinformation.
Over the past week (6/14 to 6/21) over 8 million people were exposed to climate misinformation on Twitter alone. Some of the themes we saw last week, such as questioning the connection between the impact of climate change and national security, are still going strong. General climate denial content also got a boost from a Fox News interview with climate denier Steve Koonin, who called climate change a “fiction of the media” during his June 21 appearance on Tucker Carlson Today. Koonin was introduced as a scientist, which is true -- but it’s probably important to note that he’s a scientist who earned more than $2 million in compensation from BP over five years (2004 to 2009) and who called the peer reviewed 2017 National Climate Assessment deceptive. In addition, misinformation related to wildfires out West resurfaced this week in two tweets by Jason Miller and Dan Scavino; despite the fact that this line of argument has been debunked, the content reached more than 2.5 million people. We also saw the same kind of wildfire misinformation moving on Facebook this week, most notably in a RedState post by “Bonchie” that was shared more than 1700 times.
However, a significant portion of the misinformation that we saw moving on Facebook this week centered around the announcement that Molded Fiber Glass, a wind blade manufacturing plant in South Dakota, was slated to close in August. The story, which was shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook over the past week, was based on an interview a plant employee did with Fox News blaming the Biden Administration for the plant’s closure. A piece in The Blaze that was shared more than 7,000 times on Facebook was headlined “Green Energy Worker Slams Dumb Bastard Joe Biden After Wind Turbine Factory is Forced to Close,” but it didn’t actually link to the interview. In the interview, the employee blames the phase out of the wind production tax credit in 2022 for the plant’s closure, and blames the Biden Administration for failing to support the tax credit. However, the Biden Administration has proposed to extend the wind PTC for another 10 years before phasing them out, and news reports state that Molded Fiber Glass closed because GE (their only client) stopped ordering from them once they acquired their own manufacturing plant in Denmark. Unfortunately, Molded Fiber Glass is not set up to make any other kind of product beyond the one used by GE.
Did Fox News Brian Kilmeade correct his guest’s incorrect statements? Of course he didn’t. Instead, he baited him into calling President Biden a dumb bastard on national television, tried to take the high road by disavowing name calling, blamed the Biden Administration for spreading “misinformation,” and then ended the interview. That Blaze piece is factually inaccurate and deliberately misleading -- and was shared and liked thousands of times on Facebook without context, comment, or correction. Despite all of the news about Twitter and Facebook doing more to combat climate misinformation...crickets.
How does your organization flag inaccurate information on Facebook or Twitter for the platforms? What kind of response do you get? Let us know. Drop us a line at info@thetriplecheck.org.