I find the article to be disingenuous to the extreme, and indicative of the current trend of calling all politically disfavoured speech as "misinformation". They denounce the ad, but fail to actually note a single factual error or misleading claim beyond the broad statement that they presented fossils fuels as necessary for a quality of life and part of a green lifestyle. Yet surely if that's not true, then it should be trivial to point out the factual error, right? But they don't, they don't even bother, and at the time I'm writing this, the link to the actual report is a 404.<p>I'm not carrying water for Exxon and would like us to move to sustainable energy, but by the same measure I'm sick of being told that something is "misinformation" with no justification given other than the fact that it was put forth by unpopular person or organisation.
What are the factual errors here?<p>> promoting claims that natural gas is a green or low carbon fuel, even though research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says otherwise.<p>Context matters here. I have usually seen natural gas discussed in comparison to coal. And in that context, especially if you calculate point source emissions only, it is definitely true.<p>> continued use of oil as affordable, reliable and important to keep the US from relying on other countries for its energy supply.<p>Is any of this factually inaccurate? It is affordable on account of being the standard. It is reliable as we all use it without a second thought. And it is probably the energy source that is most reliably American at the current on account of rare earths.<p>There are still lots of areas where there are no real non oil and gas solutions, like steel making or tires.<p>I personally don't see oil and gas having much of a future long term, so I am by no means on their side, but if you want to fact check, you need to do it with a specific claim in context and the article gives no indication that this is what is going on.
A social network will contain misinformation. The solution isn't to force facebook to ban content, the solution is getting people educated so they can form their own opinion. That more or less already worked and everyone tries to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, so this isn't even a problem.
I feel like the threat of misinformation wouldn't be as significant if trust in institutions wasn't so abysmally low right now.<p>Everyone needs trusted sources to make sense of the world, and if politicians and traditional media sources have repeatedly demonstrated that they aren't very trustworthy, it makes sense that people will start looking elsewhere for their information. On top of that, advertising is pretty much just half truths and lies by omission at this point anyways.<p>Of course it is a lot easier to simply deflect this responsibility onto social media, but do we really want to be empowering these mega corporations to be arbiters of truth? Social media by design isn't really capable of moderating the inflows of content responsibly as it is.
An alternate conclusion might be to employ a third party firm. Actually two or more third party firms. There'd be some overlap and a majority vote among the overlap for strongly Approved / Rejected ads.<p>Crucially the rate of pay would be based on a given provider's quality for the over-reviewed test cases.<p>Also every provider would verify with "moron in a hurry" standard of confusion / disinformation. They might also flag questionable items for review by regulatory bodies in cases where it isn't clear.
"thinktank InfluenceMap "<p>Will people catch on that the environment lobbyists are as powerful as big oil. And care about you as much as big oil.<p>At least big oil sold you a product, so they had some responsibility to make a product that benefits you. Environmental lobbyists like InfluenceMap have zero responsibility to either you or the environment, only the people funding them.
Facebook let's everybody push misinformation; just like Twitter and Reddit. At this point, it'd just be more useful to point out who's spreading misinformation, what that is, why it's misinformation, and what the up-to-date facts are.<p>That it's been spread on social media is a given and not at all surprising.