Facebook Inc.'s corporate sustainability page is festooned with a bold climate quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy and it puts our children's future at risk," the company's CEO wrote.
The sentiment is reflected in Facebook's corporate sustainability policy. The technology giant has committed to cutting its operational greenhouse gas emissions 75% of 2017 levels by this year and pledged to power all its operations with renewable energy by 2020.
No American corporation signed more deals than Facebook to buy electricity generated by wind and solar in 2019, according to the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance.
But when it comes to the challenge of curtailing climate misinformation on Facebook, Zuckerberg and his company have been silent. The platform is a hive of climate falsities and obfuscation, as posts about the Paris Agreement by conservative groups linked to the Trump administration make clear.
Misinformation on Facebook muddies the wider climate debate, giving life to false narratives about everything from the price of renewable energy to the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet, said Shahzeen Attari, a professor at Indiana University who studies behavior and climate.
"They're reducing their own carbon footprint and, in doing so as a large company, they are speeding up innovation in that sector," Attari said. "But they aren't changing the deeper structural narrative that is needed to solve the climate problem worldwide."
