Facebook and Twitter ‘give fossil fuel giants free rein to greenwash’

Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter are profiting from social media ‘greenwashing’ campaigns that promote misinformation and disinformation about the climate crisis, according to a new report.

Climate misinformation campaign group Stop Funding Heat, using data from Global Witness, claims that greenwashing – where businesses falsely publicise efforts as supportive of climate goals that in fact contribute to climate warming – is growing online.

And Global Witness claims that data shows British fossil fuel company BP more than doubled its spending on greenwashing advertisements on Facebook and Instagram in the first seven months of 2022 alone compared to the previous year.

This comes just a year after the introduction of the ‘Green Claims Code’ by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which seeks to crack down on greenwashing activity to protect consumers.

The group says their data shows that Shell continued to run ads on Instagram and Facebook that greenwash its image and allegedly bypassed the platform’s labelling requirements for political content.

Stop Funding Heat says Big Tech platforms currently have no policies in place to address greenwashing, and suggests introducing tobacco-style advertising bans for the fossil fuel industry and their lobbyists and subjecting fossil fuel adverts to more rigorous checking procedures.

Sean Buchan, campaign manager at Stop Funding Heat and author of the report said: “With a growing international movement to halt greenwashing and prevent the promotion of climate misinformation, these Big Tech platforms are on borrowed time.

“We are already seeing some regulators begin to crack down on greenwashing from large polluters, while a number of cities and towns are introducing bans on the advertising of climate-wrecking products.

“Big Tech needs to get its house in order and tackle greenwashing and climate misinformation instead of continuing to profit from it amid a climate crisis.”

A Shell spokesperson said: “We’re investing billions of dollars in lower-carbon energy. To help alter the mix of energy Shell sells, we need to grow these new businesses rapidly.

“That means letting our customers know through advertising or social media what lower-carbon products and services we offer now or are developing, so they can make a choice that is right for them.

“The world will still need oil and gas for many years to come. Investment in them will ensure we can supply the energy people will still have to rely on while lower-carbon alternatives are scaled up as that demand grows.”

A spokesperson for Meta, which encompasses Facebook, said: “While ads like these run across many platforms, including television, Meta offers an extra layer of transparency by requiring ads about environmental topics to include a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer.

“We reject ads when one of our independent fact-checking partners rates them as false or misleading and take action against Pages, Groups, accounts, and websites that repeatedly share content rated as false.”

The report’s findings come at a time of growing international momentum to tackle the issue of greenwashing. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called out fossil fuel companies for greenwashing and promoting climate misinformation. Guterres noted that fossil fuel companies have behaved “just like the tobacco industry”, riding “rough-shod over their own science”.

Alice Harrison, Fossil Fuels Campaign Leader at Global Witness, said: “It is utterly disingenuous for big polluters like BP and Shell, whose main business is in climate-wrecking fossil fuels, to pretend that they are green. These are the same companies that have bankrolled climate denial groups for years and have now simply swapped tactics under pressure from an increasing climate consensus.

“Denial has morphed into deception and delay. They’ve proven that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing – they now must be forced to comply and face serious consequences for failing to do so.”