NEW YORK ― YouTube is making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change because content creators are using new tactics that evade the social media platform’s policies to combat misinformation, according to a report published recently.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) used artificial intelligence to review transcripts from 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 of Alphabet Inc’s YouTube channels.
The channels promoted content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change that human behaviour is contributing to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, the report said according to Reuters.
CCDH, a nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, 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 from burning fossil fuels.
Videos espousing such claims are explicitly banned from generating ad revenue on YouTube, according to Google’s policy.
Instead, the report found that last year 70 per cent of climate denial content on the channels analysed 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’s up from 35 per cent five years 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 saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analysed, CCDH said.
The group said the AI model was crafted to be able to distinguish between reasonable scepticism and false information.
In a statement, YouTube did not comment directly on the report but defended its policies.
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