Zuckerberg vows to stop censoring, but ‘climate skeptics’ say it may be ‘too little, too late’

But when it comes to shaping a “climate narrative,” Zuckerberg’s company appears to have changed little.

Those who dispute the “climate crisis” narrative, which includes a wide range of credentialed experts including Nobel Prize recipients, have often been censored in one way or another on Facebook. While these voices say Zuckerberg’s announcement is welcome, many of them are skeptical that Facebook will truly foster an open debate on the issues of climate and energy.

“I don’t really go over there much. I don’t see myself going back either. Too little too late,” Dr. Matthew Wielicki, former assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama,, told Just the News.

Resisting change

Following Zuckerberg’s announcement, Legacy media outlets immediately began fretting about how the change would allow a wide range of perspectives to be shared on climate change, including those that dispute that it’s causing a crisis or that it’s a problem at all, which the legacy media often characterizes as “climate denial.”

“Meta invites climate disinformation by tossing fact-checkers,” Politico’s ClimateWire warned. “Social media sites often have served as a haven for climate disinformation and misinformation, and climate denial groups have treated the platforms as a way to reach new audiences,” the ClimateWire reporter wrote.

The article links to a Politico article about how Facebook’s “fact checkers” labeled as false an editorial by the CO2 Coalition, which was originally published in the Washington Examiner, only to overturn the label and allow the post to stay up after the group intervened.

Missing from the article are any comments from those who have been deplatformed from Facebook as a result of their views on climate change, nor is there any mention of the multiple times Facebook fact checkers made glaring mistakes. The ClimateWire reporters also didn’t interview anyone from the CO2 Coalition, even though it held them up as an example of “climate misinformation.”

Angela Wheeler, vice president of marketing and multimedia for the CO2 Coalition told Just the News that they’re optimistic about the announcement.

“We hope Mr. Zuckerberg is sincere,” Wheeler said.

Merely opinions

The perspectives of the coalition’s members have long been met with hostility — they were even ejected from a National Science Teaching Association conference in 2023 — and Facebook has been no friendlier. They were informed last month that a statement from physicist Dr. William Happer, chair of the CO2 Coalition’s Board of Directors, was against the platform’s rules and wouldn’t be shown to other users. The statement is a mixture of indisputable facts about CO2 levels throughout geological history and Happer’s opinions about the risk CO2 poses.

Facebook has yet to publish a guide for users or any details about how the self-regulating “community notes” scheme would work.

“Nothing but good can come from more atmospheric CO2. The Earth has experimented with much higher CO2 concentrations than today many times over the Phanerozoic eon, the last 540 million years or so, where the fossil record of life is especially good. Life flourished at four times more CO2 than today. There is no geological evidence that more CO2 will be anything but good for life on Earth,” the forbidden quote stated.

Facebook’s history of labelling truth as “disinformation”

The platform has often censored other statements that are demonstrably true. Facebook censored a claim, based on a study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, that nine times more people die globally from the cold than the heat. This means as temperatures rise, deaths from temperature extremes are actually decreasing.

The censored post was written by Bjorn Lomborg, Danish political scientist, author, and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. Lomborg provides an extensive defense of his claims on his website, showing that Facebook’s fact check was factually incorrect.

Facebook also censored a video from John Stossel arguing that California’s forest fires are made worse by government mismanagement. A group called Climate Feedback — the same one that deemed Happer’s and Lomborg’s claims as false — declared the video “misleading,” which meant it would be shown to fewer Facebook users without notice, an action referred to as “shadow banning.”

Climate Feedback had characterized the video as claiming that climate change has no impact on forest fires, but Stossel stated in the video that “Climate change has made things worse. California has warmed 3 degrees over 50 years.”

Stossel sued Facebook for defamation in federal court, but the case was dismissed when Meta argued that its fact checks are merely opinions, which aren’t subject to defamation claims.

False and misleading “fact checks”

Facebook also removed a post from Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pielke said the platform never explained why. Pielke also recounted in a post on X how an MIT scientist working for Climate Feedback had claimed that “weather-related natural disasters have been increasing greatly.” This is demonstrably untrue.

Stossel documented five other false and misleading “fact checks” that Climate Feedback has done against his videos, showing that Facebook’s guardians against “climate misinformation” regularly promote slap “false” labels on material that isn’t necessarily incorrect. It’s just perspectives that Climate Feedback disputes.

Were their positions platformed on their own Facebook pages and websites, it would be part of a robust, open debate. However, the group’s fact checks carry repercussions, including shadow banning. Zuckerberg’s announcement suggests that Climate Feedback may finally face repercussions of its own.

Political connections

Facebook fact checkers have also been closely associated with dark money groups who are political advocates for a transition away from fossil fuels. In 2021, Meta’s Climate Science Information Center partnered with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which is a partner with the Potential Energy Coalition, an anti-fossil fuel activist group.

Windward Fund gave Potential Energy $13 million in 2022 and $4.5 million in 2021. Windward is a partner with Arabella Advisors, a firm that reportedly oversees a vast dark-money network advancing left-wing causes. According to Potential Energy’s latest tax filings, the group brought in $38.6 million in 2022, up from $1.93 million in 2021. It spent $21.6 million in 2022, up from $11.4 million in 2021.

Skeptics being skeptical

In his announcement, Zuckerberg mentions that Facebook’s content moderation had resulted in “too much censorship,” and that the recent elections “represent a cultural tipping point.” He vowed to restore free expression on Meta’s platforms. However, climate skeptics, as they’re sometimes called, remain skeptical.

Podcaster and climate skeptic Tom Nelson told Just the News that he doesn’t use Facebook much, but after the announcement, he posted the documentary “Climate: The Movie” to the platform.

The documentary features interviews with many other researchers who challenge the dominant narrative that carbon dioxide is the main driver of a warming trend and that it’s producing an existential threat to people. It was immediately slapped with a fact check by Science Feedback, which had to once walk back a false label it placed on a Reason article on mask studies.

Wielicki, the former geology assistant professor, said that Zuckerberg is just trying to cozy up to the Trump administration, which makes his sudden change of heart about censorship unreliable.

“It seems like Mr. Zuckerberg has got one of the biggest sails on the planet, because any way the winds blow, he starts moving in that direction. So I think he sees the writing on the wall,” Wielickis said, but if a new pro-censorship administration comes next, “he’ll go right back to doing it again.”

Zuckerberg gave no timeline for when its new content moderation systems will be implemented nor specific details on its structure. Until they are, there’s no way to measure how sincere he is. Meanwhile, Wielicki and Wheeler with the CO2 Coalition said they’ve had plenty of success posting content on Elon Musk’s X platform. Even if Facebook becomes more open to a wider range of perspectives, many of its would-be users have found a new home.