Today Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project dropped Reality Drop, aimed at dispelling climate myths by getting you invested in a weird new social network.
The Reality Drop website highlights articles on climate change, both bad and good, and gives you pre-written, smart, science-y language that you can cut and paste into their comment threads. Depending on how active you are, you can move up the police-style ranks from “rookie” to “lieutenant.”
Mashable says Reality Drop “gamifies the climate change conversation”:
“No matter how much is occurring in the world with extreme weather, the industry keeps feeding denial. Though not all denial occurs online, we want to give people the tools to respond quickly and sharply to that denial,” Maggie Fox, CEO of Climate Reality, told Mashable.
“It’s time for us to go on the offense in a space that we can not only dominate, but change opinions.”
Basically, Reality Drop wants you to troll for change.
This is the kind of thing some conservative groups have done for years, except Reality Drop won’t pay you for your myth-busting time. It’s a nice idea in the very short term, until inundated community moderators start noticing that all these comments say and link to exactly the same damn thing. Spreading good information is important, but building an army of green trolls to attack Fox News would not be my preferred way to go about it.
But if giving users points for sharing important green news on their social networks actually entices people to share more important green news, don’t forget to link to Grist, because we love you. Even the trolls.
