Pinterest is making a giant leap forward in its management of climate change misinformation. A new announcement from the company will now to completely remove misleading climate claims from its platform.
That's a big step, and as Pinterest notes, it's the first to do so, not because others would like to allow more free and open speech, but also because policing such is highly complex.
As explained by Pinterest:

"Ensuring that Pinners find ideas from trusted sources no matter what type of inspiration they are looking to discover on the platform is important to Pinterest. That's why today, Pinterest is rolling out a new climate misinformation policy to keep false and misleading claims around climate change off the platform.". Our new policy makes Pinterest the sole major digital platform with clearly articulated policies against false or misleading climate change information, which includes conspiracy theories, on content and ads."

As Pinterest details further, the new policy will cover:

Content that denies the existence or impacts of climate change, the human influence on climate change, or that climate change is supported by scientific consensus.
Content that misrepresents solutions to climate change as scientifically valid when they are not.
Content that inaccurately represents scientific data, such as by omission or cherry-picking, in order to undermine confidence in climate science and its experts.
Content that misleads or deceives about public safety emergencies, such as natural disasters and extreme weather events.
All Pin content, whether it is advertisements, will be subject to the new policies. The guidelines that the platform had set for advertising will now clearly ban advertisements that espouse conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation on climate change.

Which indeed is a big step, but as noted, actually enforcing such is difficult, because what qualifies as mis- or disinformation, based on different sources, can be complex, as is the intent of the person posting.

For example, the science on how much climate change is caused by which factors is not settled science, so as there seems to be a consensus that human action is changing the global climate, debate surrounds the elements at play and how to solve each one. So are Pins about that, laying out causes of such misinformation?

What if someone accidentally sends something that questions the science of the underlying issue – that could be disinformation, or maybe it's part of the larger debate. All depends on which side you hear it from.

In the case of Pinterest, this checking will be done in collaboration with the Climate Disinformation Coalition and the Conscious Advertising Network, which will both have an input in shaping its policies aimed at dealing with harmful claims.

It will be an interesting case study – if Pinterest can, in fact, come up with an effective, workable solution to detect and correct such, that could provide a framework for other platforms to take the same approach. In this respect, Pinterest may be a particularly apt platform to study given its less direct nature of social interaction, reducing the amount of climate misinformation within the app.

Either way, it is an interesting experiment, and this too is interesting, as social platforms look to take more decisive stances on divisive issues and side with science to help tackle damaging movements.

Of course, there are risks in the restriction of speech, but at times such risks outweigh such concerns.

How each platform weighs such could be the key to the next phase of online engagement.