At the beginning of this year, TikTok announced a pledge to take action against anyone who reject the fact of climate change. According to the findings of a research project that was carried out by the BBC, which watched one video that has garnered millions of views, the company needs assistance in order to stop erroneous information about the climate from spreading over the network.
You could have seen a video featuring Dan Pea, who brands himself as a “business success coach” and has thousands of followers across numerous social media platforms, if you conducted a search on TikTok in recent months for the words “climate change.”
A video that was taken in London in 2017 at the showing of a documentary film about Mr. Pea captures an argument that takes place between an American entrepreneur and a member of the audience. The argument takes place during the Q&A session that follows the movie.
When asked what “the people with the money” would do about climate change, he said that “the financial institutions and the banks know” that climate change is not going to happen.
In addition to this, he has said that “It is the largest hoax that has been perpetrated on mankind this century.” However, he does not present any evidence that might possibly be regarded authentic.
When Mr. Pea was contacted by the BBC, he maintained his stance and said that climate change was in fact a “historical norm” that had taken place over the period of thousands of years and was “not new.” He claimed this in response to the fact that climate change has happened. He questioned whether or not it was a “serious risk” as well as the effectiveness of efforts urged by climate change campaigners in the face of growing emissions from China. He also questioned the efficacy of actions proposed by environmentalists to combat climate change. In addition to this, he cast doubt on the viability of the solutions proposed by the Chinese government.
The idea that human activity is to blame for the increase in global temperatures is supported by an overwhelming amount of scientific data. This idea suggests that the rise in global temperatures is causing fast climate change, which presents a danger to every element of human life.
An introduction to the concept of climate change that is rather easy to understand.
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However, despite the fact that Mr. Pea’s claims are in clear opposition to the scientific facts, this clip has been edited and re-uploaded hundreds of times by other users from different TikTok accounts, racking up more than nine million views in the process. This is in spite of the fact that Mr. Pea’s statements are in direct contrast to the scientific facts.
According to the new community standards that were presented by the firm in April of last year, anything that “undermines well-established scientific consensus” about climate change will not be tolerated on the TikTok platform. These new criteria were first introduced by the company.
The video portraying Mr Pea is not, however, an isolated occurrence; the BBC discovered 365 other films in English that rejected the existence of man-made climate change.
A collection of videos from the video-sharing platform TikTok that make the case that climate change is a hoax.
According to the studies, there are hundreds of videos quite similar to this one that make charges that are not true about climate change.
TikTok deems it to be “harmful deception” when people deny the existence of climate change. Because those videos made use of technology that are available to each and every TikTok user, we were able to report them to the platform under that category and have them removed. After that, we waited for at least a day to see whether they would be deleted or not before continuing our investigation.
These were videos that, having been seen more than 30 million times, created the appearance that they were getting significant attention. The organisation should have removed over 95% of the posts that we reported to them.
TikTok has provided the BBC with a statement in which it explains that it is working with fact-checkers to solve the problem of misinformation and that it is aiming “to encourage intelligent climate conversations.”
In addition, the company said that visitors are given a link to the website of the United Nations that is specifically devoted to the topic of climate change whenever they do a search for films that are associated with climate change.
A scientific communicator named Roshan Salgado D’Arcy, who uses social media to debunk viral movies that make false claims about climate change, said that the film of Mr Pea demonstrated how “bad reasoning can circulate extraordinarily fast on TikTok.”
There are no real checks and balances in place to make sure that the information is accurate, as stated in the statement.
Roshan Salgado D’Arcy, the creator of TikTok, uses his smartphone to film a video while he strolls along the street.
On the app TikTok, Roshan Salgado D’Arcy claims that erroneous content pertaining to climate change is “extremely pervasive.”
Users of the English-language version of TikTok are also acquainted with the issue: BBC Monitoring uncovered hundreds of other videos in Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and Portuguese that questioned the fact of climate change.
As a member of the general public utilising social media, it must be incredibly easy to acquire the incorrect concept of how sure we are about climate change, according to Dr. Doug McNeall, a scientist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research of the Met Office.
The proliferation of false information poses a significant risk of undermining the efficacy of the discussion we are now having about how to react to climate change.
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Why is pessimism about the state of the planet’s climate becoming viral?
TikTok is aware of the problem, which is why the business announced in April, in honour of Earth Month, that it will begin proactively removing content that contradicts core climate science.
It listed specific examples of material that violated the rules in a blog post that was written at the time and published at the same location. “the denial of the reality of climate change or the presence of the factors that contribute to it.”
However, the easy accessibility of videos such as those depicting Mr Pea raises concerns about the efficacy of the new policy’s implementation.
According to Jennie King, who is in charge
“At the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, I am involved in climate research and policy.” in the United Kingdom, a think tank that focuses on countering extremism, “Rules become antiquated if they are not enforced consistently, properly, and equitably.” The “Institute for Strategic Dialogue” calls the United Kingdom its home base.
Ms. King claims that as a result of this, people have more self-assurance to participate in “gaming the system even more, because they believe they can now act with impunity.”
According to statements made by Paul Scully, a Member of Parliament and Minister for Technology and the Digital Economy, provided to the BBC, the proposed Online Safety Bill by the government would guarantee that the responsibility of social media firms to fight disinformation is “taken seriously.”
Pictured above is Dr. Jennie King, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s director of climate research and policy.
According to Jennie King, the emphasis that TikTok has put on the removal of content is “not only potentially unconstructive, but practically unenforceable.”
As a consequence of our team’s presentation of the findings of our research to the TikTok team, the firm took the decision to permanently remove the sixty-five user accounts that had broken the rules of service by releasing fraudulent content pertaining to climate change.
After the firm had completed its purge, the vast majority of the videos that were still accessible through the company’s website were those that featured Dan Pea’s presentation from 2017.
Despite this, numerous different versions of the video clip in which Dan Pea refers to climate change as the “greatest fraud” are still accessible to view on the app as of the time this article was written.
In spite of the fact that Dr. McNeall from the Met Office applauds TikTok’s efforts to fight misinformation, he is worried about whether or not this is a problem that the company can effectively resolve.
He goes on to say, “As a scientist, I’m glad to be questioned,” and I have faith that he is telling the truth.
It would be more constructive for us to focus on sharing correct knowledge about climate science rather than just removing the bits that we don’t like, since this would lead to more positive outcomes.