Facebook is rejecting ads promoting stories about climate change. File photo. Photo: AFP
Facebook is rejecting ads promoting stories about climate change under a policy restricting "sensitive" or "heavily debated" topics, New Zealand Geographic magazine says.
Publisher James Frankham said the algorithm determining what could and could not be boosted on the platform was preventing important journalism from reaching new readers, and it was impossible to find out exactly why posts were rejected.
The award-winning magazine focusses on long-form journalism on science, the environment and outdoors.
Media commentators said the magazine was not alone in finding its journalism being restricted on the platform, as Facebook's owner, Meta, moved away from sharing links to news.
Rejected posts
Frankham said changes to the kinds of posts Meta promoted automatically into people's feeds meant he now had to pay to get any traction for links to the magazine's journalism.
Typically he could put a small amount - $10-$30 - behind a post to get it in front of an audience.
However, attempts to pay to boost stories mentioning climate change were being rejected.
Meta has rules requiring authorisation for advertising on what the company deems sensitive political or social issues. Rules vary by country, but in most jurisdictions the policy flags topics such as gun control as well as "discussion, debate or advocacy for or against ... climate change."
Frankham said the algorithms determining what could and could not be boosted were a "black box" and he could not reach a real person to find out why posts were rejected.
"You can't call 0800 Facebook and speak to somebody."
He appealed the rejections using Meta's process, but was knocked back.
He shared the wording of two recent thwarted posts with RNZ.
One highlighted a long-form reported feature on an old British law that might hold big carbon dioxide polluters to account in New Zealand.
The other promoted a deep-dive podcast, produced with RNZ, delving into the science behind how Fiordland's ecosystem stored vast amounts of carbon dioxide in the ocean.
Frankham said sometimes posts promoting climate-related journalism made it through, so it was hard to know why those specific stories were rejected.
"It got picked up by Meta's algorithm that is looking for language that is political or talked about climate change [which is deemed] a hot-button topic and in this case it was declined.
"We played a pretty straight bat with this (Fiordland feature), as we always do. It's not advocacy, it's journalism, so it's pretty hard to know how these decisions get made."
A story delving into the way Fiordland's ecosystem stores carbon dioxide was rejected for paid promotion by Facebook. Photo: © Richard Robinson
'Gas extraction' singled out in NZ
Meta did not respond to emails RNZ sent to three different staff members asking about its ad policy and why the New Zealand Geographic posts were rejected for boosting.
RNZ also asked Meta why "gas extraction" was singled out as a restricted topic in New Zealand.
The New Zealand-specific policy on its website says: "Ads about environmental politics, with ad content that includes discussion, debate or advocacy for or against topics including but not limited to climate change and gas extraction, are subject to review and enforcement."
New Zealand appears to be the only jurisdiction where Meta specifically mentions "gas extraction" as a restricted topic of discussion. Other countries have different issues flagged - in Australia it is coal and the Great Barrier reef, in the EU fracking, in India it is air pollution and its damage to lives, while Taiwan names nuclear energy.
The website gives two example of phrases needing authorisation in New Zealand, again highlighting gas as one of them. "How can we better tackle climate change?" and "Gas exploration is ruining our community" are the two examples of words that will be flagged for review.
One thing all jurisdictions have in common is that ads for buying products escape the restrictions.
In New Zealand, the two examples of acceptable wording are: "Lower your energy bills! Buy our energy-saving refrigerator," and "Take a look at our new 2020 electric car debuted at this week's car show."
"You can encourage consumption, it seems, but you can't encourage or even really talk about reduction ... and specifically reduction of gas, strangely," Frankham said.
"That's not something we did say in either of our posts, but our posts got picked up by the same trigger, and at the end of the day you don't know which aspect of your post failed, other than it got picked up by this robot filter."
Media journalist Duncan Greive. Photo: supplied
Wider issues
Media journalist and Spinoff website founder Duncan Greive said Meta's power as gatekeeper left news outlets in a difficult spot, now that the platform had pulled away from sharing news.
In Canada and Australia, the social media site was unhappy with laws requiring it to pay for news shared on its platform, at times blocking users in those countries from accessing news via Facebook at all.
In New Zealand, progress on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill - built on similar lines to Australia's - had stalled.
Meanwhile, Greive said the prominence given to news in non-paid posts on Facebook had plummeted faster than could be explained by people's changing reading habits.
"The pace at which Facebook has withdrawn from distributing links to news content has been quite breathtaking. Some sites have seen 70, 80, 90 percent reductions in traffic that used to come through Facebook."
Yet Facebook remained one of the best ways for publishers like New Zealand Geographic to find readers who were not already fans, he said.
"For a certain demographic, probably an older demographic (than purely video-focussed sites) ... Facebook retains a near-total command of the available audience.
"In terms of an instant the flick-the-switch option where you can get traffic that isn't your core audience, Facebook is one of the best places to find that."
Greive said local news outlets overseas had also found their journalism hard or impossible to promote on the site, while posts of opinions and even videos sharing misinformation could still reach a wide audience.
Colin Peacock of RNZ's Mediawatch said Facebook was a private company and could set its own policies - but in this case, it had it wrong.
He said there was a strong public interest in people being able to find journalism discussing topics such as climate change.
"Any private media or technology company is entitled to set its own policy about what it will and won't do about getting people to pay for their services. That's their right," he said.
"But where Facebook has created an entire platform where you have to pay to boost the exposure of an article, it seems completely inappropriate for them to make what is essentially an editorial decision that even articles prompting discussion about that topic is something they don't want to be involved with, so I think it's editorially indefensible."
He said the platform needed to recognise that it was a publisher, not just a pipeline for posts.