On Friday, we rolled our collective eyes at the latest GOP-washing in an E&E/PoliticoPRO story, so today we're going to highlight a great story that reminded us why the subscription's worth it.
Kelsey Brugger interviewed Rep. Ro Khanna, Democratic chair of the House Oversight's Environment subcommittee and Silicon Valley-representing Californian who's got some plans to hold Big Tech accountable for climate disinformation.
Brugger reported that "his office has been working with the Climate Disinformation Coalition" to press Big Tech to "increase transparency" and for Facebook and Twitter specifically to "take their own steps to create standards for companies to follow."
We're not so sure voluntary standards are going to cut it, but it sounds like Rep. Khanna's got a bit more than just that in mind.
When he calls Zuckerberg and other CEOs to testify, he intends to ask directly if they're "targeting people based on their profile to join these climate denial groups? How does the algorithm work? Are certain posts that are denying climate — if they're sensational — getting recommended by your algorithm?"
Specifically, "If something is blatantly false, equivalent to a 'flat Earth' type of post, or group, what do you see as your responsibility in limiting its virality? Or do you see yourself as not having any responsibility on that?"
Khanna is a "a strong First Amendment person" and wants to "allow for First Amendment's values to be protected," so he thinks "the government's role is to provide a diversity of discursive spaces and to require disclosure and maybe to create places in education for literacy about climate, based on facts, and then for the social media companies to come up with the standards of what they think what they want to stand for."
So just like how "government cannot dictate the standards, just like the government doesn't dictate the standards for E&E News, right, on what you can print and what you don't print," there do need to be some sort of standards so that they're not "just gossip and conspiracy theories."
On the censorship point particularly, Khanna says he does "understand some of those concerns" and "wouldn't say if someone is going to push back against what I believe on climate that their voices should be censored."
There should certainly be debate, "but that debate should not be distorted with millions of dollars behind a certain point of view."
The industry spending on climate disinfo is "a distortion in the public sphere, where you've got certain viewpoints that happen to align with industry interests being funded with billions of dollars. And that is really the challenge."
"If there were a Flat Earth Society on the internet," Khanna said, "I don't think people would say, 'Well, we should ban the Flat Earth Society from existing.' But if suddenly, 20 or 30 million Americans were being targeted with this and those groups were growing, I think that would be a legitimate concern."
And if the Flat Earthers were blocking any policy that assumed a round Earth, condemning the planet to be flattened by political correctness, one would hope Big Tech would do something!
Michael Khoo, Co-chair of the Climate Disinformation Coalition that's consulting with Khanna, told Brugger that progress is quite possible.
“We’ve seen a number of different strategies social media companies can do at the turn of a switch. Solving climate change is quite complex. Solving disinformation is quite simple.”
