Between former US President Barack Obama praising Pinterest and Twitter's moves to limit climate disinformation, and a former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tweeting about the recent "Deny, Deceive, Delay" report's findings on Rupert Murdoch's Sky News as a "central source" of climate denial, it seems formerly elected climate-conscious leaders are noticing that they can't just message around disinfo with "jobs!" mantras that poll well but say nothing.
Most notably, Obama's EPA administrator and President Biden's climate adviser Gina McCarthy invoked the D word (disinfo) in a June 9th Axios event. It was billed as "a conversation on battling misinformation," and also featured Dr. Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable to talk about vaccine messaging and 3M's chief science advocate Dr. Jayshree Seth discussed the company's recent findings about Americans not trusting social media.
The event on misinformation was sponsored by 3M, which is notable because just last year 3M agreed to pay $98 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over their toxic PFAS chemicals that they knew for decades were toxic but kept selling. Which means that even companies who use the disinformation playbook to protect their dangerous products from public scrutiny see (the Discourse about) combatting disinformation as a lucrative field to exploit and co-opt, and media companies looking to make an easy buck will no doubt unquestioningly oblige their generosity advertising expenditures.
Gina McCarthy called out the industrial disinformation being cataloged on social media by reports like "Deny, Deceive, Delay," saying, "frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation. That’s what the fossil fuel companies pay for … that’s what they do.”
And as if to prove her point, some of the specific individuals the fossil fuel industry has funded to spread disinformation sprang into action.
The first, and funniest response was from the CO2 Coalition, which posted on Facebook about how "The Biden administration's climate czarina Gina McCarthy is advocating further censorship of any and all criticism…" approximately 21 minutes after they posted about banning a user from their Facebook page because of their criticisms.
The more formal response, though, was even more deeply ironic and telling. That came a day later, when Newsmax and the Washington Examiner published nearly identical pieces that clearly drew from the same press release that sought to make it falsely appear as though not-only Heartland Institute-affiliated disinformation mongers were outraged.
At Newsmax, it was "Free Speech Advocates Slam Biden's 'Climate Fuhrer' for Wanting to Censor Critics," while the Washington Examiner chose to dodge the descriptor and used the passive-voiced "Climate ‘fuhrer’ ripped for urging censorship of Biden critics."
Both began with near-identical paragraphs of context that "Biden's climate czar" has "drawn {the ire of}{an angry response from} free speech {environmental} advocates." Both then point out that McCarthy was Obama's "environmental director," an awkward and inaccurate way of saying "EPA administrator" and that she called for social media platforms to remove climate disinformation.
Then the two roads diverge, but only in that the Examiner jumps to a quote from Steve Milloy before going back to quote McCarthy's exact comments, whereas Newsmax carries Gina's quote before Milloy's. Both make the point that social media companies have made some moves on disinfo, then mention "record-high gas prices" as though they're directly related.
After that, both pieces simply copy and paste quotes from the press release. And what those quotes say aren't important, but who's saying them is, because they're not "free speech advocates," they're people paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread disinformation, precisely as McCarthy pointed out.
Steve Milloy, he who cried "führer(?)", was a leader of the tobacco industry's disinformation efforts, before losing and shifting to fossil fuels, for whom he continued his war for air pollution.
James Taylor is the president of the Heartland Institute, while a third quote on the release came from Frank Lasée, who Taylor replaced for the job leading the organization which not only spreads climate disinformation, but also is still defending smoking with disinformation!
So if you think that the tobacco industry's hired hands should be able to tell social media users that smoking is cool and not at all bad for you, then yes, perhaps these "free speech advocates" would be persuasive. But given that the public is thoroughly disabused of any notion of smoking being safe, perhaps the fossil fuel industry could find someone not stained by tobacco to deny disinfo's dangers?
Then again, while the Wall Street Journal didn't quote any smokey experts, they did deliver the exact same message in an editorial, so perhaps the industry's already found its mouthpiece!