Conscious Advertising Network’s Murray: ‘We Need Democratic Regulation’ to Combat Climate Disinfo

EXCERPT:

MURRAY: “We need democratic regulation of this as well. We need measures which increase transparency. We need responsible -- we need responsible moderation within platform design, and we need to support media literacy as well. And we need to understand that when we're talking about that trillion dollars of ad spend next year, we're talking about a financial market, and maybe it's time to regulate it as such. And a way to do that could be looking at the principle of knowing your buyer when thinking about the supply chain. And the third measure is inoculation. And there is a big difference between genuine local concerns about climate initiatives, which is important and are needed for debate, compared to hoaxes that exist out there and which are amplified because too often fear and falsehoods travel faster online than fact. And these are examples like whales, as in the animal, not the country, being killed by offshore wind farms, or things like whether Madonna started floods in Brazil, which is a real case -- speak to my colleague down the front if you want to know more about that. And we need these campaigns to work with communities to engage with these concerns and to confront -- with -- with genuine and to confront disinformation and misinformation. And finally, amongst that inoculation, we need climate journalism. It's critical, and we need to make sure it's well-funded and not subject to deplatforming or being removed from algorithms or downranked through algorithms. Just in closing, I think platforms, you need to build systems with transparency and safety design amongst them. The advertising industry needs to look at its supply chains, create human rights responsible advertising, and you need to reflect on the fact that these warnings have been coming for long enough and that at some point you're moving from naive to negligence. And when it comes to states, you need to introduce democratic regulation, you need to require transparency. This initiative is fantastic. It's a great beginning. But we must look at the ecosystem and the drivers behind this to be successful in a critical year leading up to COP30.”