All talk, no rules: Content moderation practices and discursive strategies in platform governance of climate misinformation

The spread of misinformation plays a significant role in shaping how climate change is understood—or misunderstood—in public discourse. Social media platforms have become central environments in which climate change is discussed and in which climate misinformation emerges, circulates, and gains visibility. This article explores how major social media platforms—Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and X/Twitter—govern climate misinformation and what discursive strategies they use to legitimize their interventions and negotiate responsibility. Through qualitative content analysis of 95 documents, pertaining to platforms’ rules and public communications, the paper shows that climate misinformation is rarely treated as a distinct, high-priority category in platform policies: commitments articulated in public communication are frequently absent from formal rules, and platforms primarily rely on “soft” interventions such as labeling and demotion while largely avoiding content removal. The analysis further identifies three cross-platform discursive strategies through which platforms construct responsibility and legitimize their interventions: increasing the good, decreasing the bad ; empowering others ; and authorizing content creators . Together, these strategies allow platforms to cultivate a narrative of benevolence and neutrality that legitimizes limited regulatory effort, whereas governance labor and responsibility is redistributed. Platforms thereby replace enforceable duties with performative evidence of care. The paper highlights the limits of platform self-governance and points to the need of external oversight that specifies and enforces platform governance of climate misinformation.