Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Capitol on May 18, 2020. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Controversy over Facebook’s handling of climate misinformation is drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper, Brian Schatz, and Sheldon Whitehouse are demanding more information from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a reported “loophole” for climate misinformation in Facebook’s fact-checking program.

In a letter sent directly to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, the senators reference a widely reported-on incident from last year, that involved a story about climate change models written by two people from an organization called the CO2 Coalition and published by Washington Examiner. The piece questioned the extent of climate change and was flagged as false by one of Facebook’s third party factchecking partners, Science Feedback. Five scientists contributed to the factcheck and concluded that the piece had “very low” scientific credibility and misled people about how climate change models actually work, and the post was labeled as false. The label was later removed, after Facebook reiterated to Science Feedback its policies about factchecking opinion.

As the senators’ letter points out, Facebook’s handling of this particular incident raises questions about how the platform handles factchecking as well as all content on its platform that is labeled as or deemed to be opinion. The lawmakers also raised questions about the extent to which Facebook is actually committed to clamping down on disinformation. Now, Warren and her colleagues want to know more about what type of posts Facebook is exempting from factchecking because they’re deemed opinion and how Facebook factors in false information about climate climate within its overall efforts combat fake news.

Facebook admits that there’s confusion about its approach. Facebook’s policy communications director Andy Stone told the New York Times earlier this week that the company’s opinion exception for factchecking has existed since 2016. According to the paper, “Mr. Stone said that The Washington Examiner post, originally published as an op-ed, clearly aligned with Facebook’s definition of opinion content and added that fact checkers should have been aware of that classification.” Stone also said that climate change content doesn’t create an imminent threat to peoples’ health or safety.

But following the publication of that article, Facebook representative Liz Bourgeois provided another statement, which was shared with Recode.

“When someone posts content based on false facts — even if it’s an op-ed or editorial — it is still eligible for fact-checking,” Bourgeois said. “We’re working to make this clearer in our guidelines so our fact checkers can use their judgment to determine whether it is an attempt to mask false information under the guise of opinion.”

In short, just because content calls itself opinion doesn’t mean it’s ineligible for factchecking.

“Even though they claim that it’s an opinion piece, there were many statements of fact, in the piece, and those statements were either wrong or misleading,” Andrew Dessler, the climate change expert at Texas A&M who contributed to the Science Feedback factcheck, told Recode. “Facebook is this impenetrable fortress that nobody has any idea — as far as I can tell at least — how these decisions are made. So I don’t know who made the decision to do it.”

The confusion over what’s is eligible for factchecking come as Facebook faces accusations of having a double-standard for misinformation. While Covid-19 misinformation has been aggressively taken down — for having the thread of imminent harm — climate misinformation isn’t treated the same way. At the same time, the company still facing wide-ranging criticism over how it handles sources of misinformation and disinformation.

“[T]he climate crisis and environmental degradation are not matters of opinion,” the senators wrote. “They are existential threats that hurt communities and economies throughout the world – including and especially Black communities and other communities of color – and will continue to do so.”

This echos other critics of the platform. Earlier this month, climate leaders and several prominent politicians, including Tom Steyer and Stacey Abrams, wrote a letter to Facebook’s Oversight Board demanding that the company close the loophole that allows content to be deemed ineligible for factchecking after being labeled as opinion. That letter followed a joint report from the newsletters HEATED and Popular Information. At the same time, Facebook is facing an ongoing boycott from advertisers called Stop Hate for Profit, which is led by civil rights leaders urging the company to fight hate speech and misinformation, including climate denialism.

“I think that Facebook is making a business decision here. This is not any kind of principled stand about opinion,” said Dessler about the confusion surrounding Facebook’s policies. “We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible situation here where we’ve left it up to corporations to make decisions about what people can say.”

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