Facebook says its third-party fact-checking partners’will review and rate climate misinformation, and there has never been a prohibition against them doing so’.

Tech behemoth says it does not consider all climate change content’opinion’. But opinion articles about climate change do n’t receive fact-checking, a policy Facebook says it began in 2016.

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom carper, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Brian schatz said in a statement.’we should trust them to make and follow their own rules and procedures, even if it results in the distortion of facts and the mass dissemination of falsehoods,’ they said.

Last August, Facebook removed a’false’ rating from an op-ed published by the Washington Examiner that cast doubt on the accuracy of climate change models. Initially, Facebook’s independent fact checker flagged the article as’highly misleading’ because it included inaccurate information and cherry-picked data. The CO2 coalition, a non-profit group created by former Trump advisor William happer, protested the rating.

According to E & E news, Facebook created a de facto loophole for opinion articles to escape fact checking. But Facebook says that this was the policy the entire time.

The senators wrote a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on July 15th. They objected to the alleged loophole and demanded Facebook explain how the decision to change the rating was made.

‘placing statements that are verifiably false in an opinion section should n’t grant immunity from fact-checking,’ said Scott Johnson, a science editor at one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers.

Facebook has told its independent fact-checkers that opinion content is not subject to fact-checking. The policy has been in place since 2016.

The senators asked if disinformation around climate change is treated differently than fake covid-19 posts. Facebook is most concerned with more immediate threats like hate speech or coronavirus disinformation.

Climate change is expected to lead to an additional 250,000 deaths every year between 2030 and 2050 because of malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.