Attacks on renewable energy are proliferating on YouTube

The nature of climate misinformation on Google-owned YouTube is evolving, according to a new report. Videos espousing climate denial are declining across nearly 100 YouTube channels, while videos attacking solutions such as wind and solar are proliferating.

The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified 96 YouTube channels that frequently disseminate what it described as misleading climate talking points, including the channels for libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute, conservative nonprofit PragerU and controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson. An AI model trained on climate denial, backstopped by human checks, was then used to review the transcripts of some 12,000 climate-related videos posted since 2018.

About half of the videos were found to contain climate misinformation or disinformation, and each claim was sorted into five broad categories:

Global warming is not happening. Human-generated greenhouse gases are not causing global warming. The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless. Climate solutions won’t work. Climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.

Researchers described the first two categories as “old denial”. At least one video claimed, for example, that cold weather means global warming isn’t real.

The latter three categories are part of “new denial,” and largely consist of attacks on climate solutions and the credibility of climate experts. The researchers found examples of videos claiming that people’s standard of living will decrease with a transition away from fossil fuels; that renewable projects require more land than fossil fuels; and that energy-efficiency policies don’t actually reduce energy use. The researchers also identified sub-claims within each category and many videos included multiple types of denial claims.

Old-denial claims “have absolutely collapsed,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive officer of the CCDH. In 2018, old denial comprised two-thirds of climate-denial claims across the 96 channels studied; by 2023, it was down to one-third. Roughly the opposite was true of new-denial claims, which more than tripled over that time period.

The report attributes the shift in part to the visible impacts of climate change, which are getting too big for the public to ignore. It’s likely also a reflection of YouTube’s improving policies around misinformation. In 2018, the site teamed up with Wikipedia to add fact checks to climate videos. In October 2021, YouTube instituted a ban on advertisements for videos that explicitly deny that climate change is real and/or that humans are to blame.

“The platform policies are changing what people say,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who studies online misinformation and disinformation and was not involved in the CCDH analysis. “This report is evidence that they do,” she added.

YouTube’s ad policy isn’t foolproof, though; the CCDH found multiple instances of advertising on climate-denial videos. “We did see ads leaking into the old-denial content,” Ahmed said.

Heartland Institute spokesman Jim Lakely said that advertising has run on the group’s climate videos posted to YouTube, adding that those videos are also “regularly suppressed” by the site. “I find it disgusting that this phony report will be used to demonetise our modest channel and censor us,” Lakely wrote in an email to Bloomberg Green.

YouTube made nearly US$8bil (RM37.75bil) in advertising in the third quarter of 2023 alone; any advertising on videos across the channels CCDH studies is likely to be small by comparison. But the exceptions do show how the company can profit off of climate misinformation it has repeatedly promised to address.

“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” Nate Funkhouser, a Google spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “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.”

After reviewing the analysis, Google found that some of the videos shared by the CCDH did violate the existing climate-denial policy and stopped ads from running on them.

Ahmed’s team is urging Google, which is part of Alphabet Inc, to also ban advertising on videos that attack climate solutions and experts. “Given that the battleground has shifted and the new denial is the biggest component of climate denial content overall, it’s time for them to extend their rules to that as well,” he said.

Funkhouser said Google is continuously reviewing its policies, but did not comment on whether the company is planning to act on the report’s ad recommendations. – Bloomberg