American online video-sharing and social media platform YouTube is being accused of making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change.
The accusers say this happens because content creators are using new tactics that evade the social media platform’s policies to combat misinformation.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in a report on Tuesday said it used artificial intelligence to review transcripts from 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 of Alphabet Inc’s YouTube channels. The report said these channels promoted content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change that human behavior is contributing to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns.
CCDH is a nonprofit that monitors online hate speech. It said its analysis found that climate denial content has shifted away from false claims that global warming is not happening or that it is not caused by greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels. According to Google’s policy, videos espousing such claims are banned from generating ad revenue on YouTube,
The report found that last year 70% of climate denial content on the channels analyzed focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, portraying global warming as harmless or beneficial, or casting climate science and the environmental movement as unreliable. That percentage was 35% five years ago.
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said “A new front has opened up in this battle,” “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
CCDH said YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analyzed. The group said the AI model was crafted to be able to distinguish between reasonable skepticism and false information.
CCDH called on YouTube to update its policy on climate denial content and said the analysis could assist the environmental movement to combat false claims about global warming more broadly.
YouTube did not comment directly on the report but defended its policies.
A YouTube spokesperson said.
“Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed,”. “However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”