YouTube earns millions a year from channels that promote climate denial content, says new report

YouTube is making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change, as content creators employ new tactics that evade the platform's policies to combat misinformation, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) usedartificial intelligence to review transcripts of 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 YouTube channels. YouTube is owned by Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.

The channels promoted content that underminesthe scientific consensus on climate change that human behaviour contributes to long-term shifts in temperature and weatherpatterns, the report said.

Shifting argument

CCDH, a non-profit that monitors online hate speech, said itsanalysis found that climate denial content has shifted away fromfalse claims that global warming is not happening or that it isnot caused by greenhouse gases produced from burning fossilfuels. Videos espousing such claims are explicitly banned fromgenerating ad revenue on YouTube, according to Google's policy.

Instead, the report found that 70 per centof climatedenial content on the channels it analyzed last year focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, portraying global warming asharmless or beneficial, or casting climate science and theenvironmental movement as unreliable. That's up from 35 per cent fiveyears earlier.

"A new front has opened up in this battle," Imran Ahmed,chief executive of CCDH, said on a call with reporters. "The people that we've been looking at, they've gone from sayingclimate change isn't happening to now saying, 'Hey, climate change is happening but there is no hope. There are nosolutions.'"

YouTubedefends policies

YouTube earns up to $13.4 million a year from ads on thechannels included in the analysis, CCDH said. The group said theAI model was crafted to be able to distinguish betweenreasonable skepticism and false information.

In a statement, YouTube did not comment directly on thereport but defended its policies.

"Debate or discussions of climate change topics, includingaround public policy or research, is allowed," a YouTube spokesperson said. "However, when content crosses the line toclimate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos."

CCDH called on YouTube to update its policy on climatedenial content and said the analysis could assist the environmental movement to combat false claims about globalwarming more broadly.