Tag: Climate Change Disinformation

Abstract

The evolution brought by social media as well as the Internet itself has led to new paradigms in journalism and mass communication. New technologies revolutionize the way humans communicate and get informed about what is happening in the world; in parallel, however, individuals and organizations can exploit these new paradigms to pursue their own agenda. In this light, the spread of misinformation and disinformation can have a variety of negative effects on society, for instance, by creating dipoles in the political dialogue and threatening democracy, putting the health and security of citizens at risk through falsified information, or spreading conspiracy theories about climate change and the environment. To help in the fight against misinformation, the present study focuses on an innovative approach that evaluates and combines the results of different content verification services. This approach, entitled “Meta-Detection Toolset (MDT)” for content verification, consists of an algorithmic consensus (voting) mechanism based on weights, which rewards or penalizes verification services on the basis of their prediction results and the ground truth (verification labels) provided by human domain experts (fact checkers or other). Using a dedicated weight recalculation algorithm, as the feedback of the experts is gradually provided, the weights are recalculated and updated constantly, thus forming a continuous learning procedure for content verification.

Abstract

Urgent de-carbonization means a massive systemic change that requires a coherent approach for spurring global investments while reorientating them toward Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs). Both issues require a macroeconomic rebalancing with geographical and geopolitical impacts. Available model-based scenarios are dangerously misleading because they rely upon implicit assumptions that ignore the permacrisis with its growing uncertainty and the systemic and governance issues that plague the present unsustainable economic order. After giving the order of magnitude of the huge amounts of urgent investments required by global de-carbonization, this chapter warns against “greenwishing” (the illusion that low-cost solutions are at hand) and, more precisely, against two major flaws in the current financial system. First, even with a CO₂ tax in view, private yields are unable to reorient investments to de-carbonization on time. Second, the asymmetric International Monetary System is unable to ensure the capital inflows necessary to close the estimated funding gap in the EMDEs. This assessment implies the need for a multilateral intervention at two levels: (i) to compensate today’s private yields in investments that abate greenhouse gases, because CO₂ taxation, which needs to be slowly progressive, is unable to compensate ex ante the too high uncertain expectations on de-carbonization investments; and (ii) to issue a safe asset at the multilateral level, creating a global Lender-of-Last-Resort able to manage global liquidity, solving the Triffin Dilemma.