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Mizzou professor, a centrist on climate change, loses weather page to Facebook removal

Atmospheric scientist and University of Missouri Professor Anthony Lupo recently discovered the Midwest Missouri Weather page he maintained on Facebook for more than five years had “vanished” with no clear indication of why.

The scholar told The College Fix it was taken down after he debated a follower regarding whether the Show-Me State’s busy tornado season was due to La Niña or climate change.

“Sunday morning I found that my personal Facebook account was locked, and I had a message from Meta … to show me how to unlock my account, which I did,” Lupo said in a recent telephone interview regarding the disappearance of the page earlier this month.

After he unlocked his account on June 8, he said he “found that the weather page was gone.”

Among Lupo’s initial suppositions for why the page was taken down was that one or more of his posts may have been flagged by another user, or an algorithm, for referencing climate change as part of larger discussions regarding Missouri weather.

However, Lupo acknowledged he does not have more than circumstantial evidence of this, as Facebook did not provide him with a reason for why the page was taken down.

He said the page offered weather forecasts, and also sometimes summarized Missouri climate and the seasonal climate.

“Occasionally, when I’ve done that, I got messages about violating community standards,” Lupo said, adding that this baffled him as the page was “just summarizing numbers.”

“I would get this warning that your post may violate community standards and that would appear on the page itself for a short time,” he said.

He said it was confusing, as he was just informing people whether the temperature was above or below normal, almost saying nothing about climate change itself.

But shortly before his weather page disappeared, Lupo said he made a post regarding why this year’s tornado season seemed to be so busy, citing the La Niña year, which typically produces stormier weather in some regions.

However, Lupo said another user who previously had used the comments section to present his own views pushed back against Lupo’s claims, attributing this year’s increased tornado count to climate change as an alternative explanation.

He described it as a mildly “combative” interaction but not overtly hostile or impolite. Yet the timing suggests it might have prompted the page’s removal, he told The Fix.

Asked about his thoughts on climate change’s role in tornadic activity, Lupo said that although he does not believe it should be completely dismissed, there are other factors that need to be considered.

This year’s busy season he said is “probably a combination of La Niña [and] some longer term cycles.”

“How climate change fits in with tornadoes is difficult to say because tornadoes are notoriously difficult to gauge trends by,” he added. “To count tornadoes you got to have somebody to see it. So, if you look at tornado numbers, they’re generally biased to where you have a [large] population and-or radars.”

“A hundred years ago,” he noted, “the weather bureau thought that [the] normal amount of tornadoes in the United States was 100. Today we know it’s 1200.” This, he said, is partly because we have more people, as well as new technologies.

In a later email to The Fix he wrote it would be fair to call him a centrist on many climate change issues more broadly, as he does not want to discount human contributions to climate change, but also does not believe those contributions are the only factors at play.

Regarding the disappearance of his weather page, Lupo stated he also is open to alternative explanations that have nothing to do with the content of the page. For example, he said he believes it is possible that the page may have been taken down because another website archived some of his old posts without his permission and there may have been some confusion on Facebook’s part regarding the authenticity of his page.

Additionally, Lupo wrote in an email to The Fix that he received a notification from Meta that someone attempted to access his personal account from another state. Yet, it remains unclear why this would lead to his weather page being taken down and why he did not regain access to it once he had cleared up the matter.

The College Fix reached out to Meta via email regarding the disappearance of Lupo’s Midwest Missouri Weather Page, as well as with questions regarding whether downplaying the role of climate change in increased tornadic activity or having old Facebook posts archived by a third party could result in the removal of a Facebook page. Meta did not reply.

In November 2022, Meta released a pair of posts regarding the company’s approach to climate content and alleged climate misinformation, as well as the company’s broader efforts to combat climate change more broadly.

However, it remains unclear whether the kinds of posts Lupo described himself as making would have constituted “climate misinformation,” according to Meta’s 2022 posts or the company’s current “misinformation” policy. It is also unclear whether such posts would lead to the removal of a page according to current penalties for sharing “fact-checked” information.

Earlier this year Meta announced, as part of an effort to allow more free speech and decrease needless censorship, it would end third-party fact checking on its platforms in the United States, transition to a Community Notes program akin to what is found on X, and limit the use of certain policy enforcement tools to the most severe violations entailing acts such as terrorism, child exploitation, and scams.

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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Professor Anthony Lupo and an image of a tornado / Headshot, courtesy photo, weather image by Grok

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About the Author
College Fix contributor Daniel Nuccio holds master's degrees in both psychology and biology. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in biology at Northern Illinois University where he is studying the impact of social isolation on host-microbe interactions and learning new coding techniques to integrate into his research.