Crack Down On “New Climate Denial,” Nonprofit tells YouTube (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

The Center for Countering Digital Hate put out a new report a few days ago, in which they warn that climate misinformation continuous to flourish on YouTube. They want YouTube to take more action. Let’s have a look

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is an American-British non-governmental non-profit organization. For their new report, they used artificial intelligence to crawl YouTube videos and to classify all types of climate misinformation that it came across.

They found that outright climate change denial, that is claims that the climate isn’t changing or that humans are not responsible for it, have strongly declined. Instead, the majority of climate misinformation is now what they call the “new denial”.

This encompasses claims that acknowledge the climate is changing and we are causing it, but it’s nothing to worry about, or it’s actually good for us, or if it’s not good then we can’t do anything about it anyway. To the “New denial” they also add a general dismissal of climate science or climate scientists as unreliable. Their analysis found that this “New Denial” now makes up 70% of all climate denial claims made on YouTube, up from 35 percent six years ago.

This shift has been going on for some years, and you will probably see the “new deniers” in the comment section below because they like to follow me around. It’s the type that claims carbon dioxide is good for plants therefore all is well, and all climate scientists are frauds and so on.

 The main reason for this shift is probably that it’s simply become futile to ignore the evidence for climate change. A secondary reason may be that YouTube doesn’t allow monetization of videos of the old denial type, whereas the new denial type can be monetized. Personally, I think that’s only a small part of the reason because we’ve seen the same shift on twitter which until recently couldn’t be monetized all.

The report contains quite a few examples of videos that use the new denial. Most of them have few views, but some of them go into the millions,  featuring people such as Jordan Peterson  or being produced by Prager University. The center estimate that YouTube makes more than 13 million dollars in revenue each year from the new climate denial. Which doesn’t sound like much unless it’s in your own bank account.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate then calls on YouTube to update its policy. The current policy is:  “We do not allow content that contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.” And the policy they recommended policy: “We do not allow content that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”  They also recommend more demonetization on YouTube and other social media.

I see a big problem with that recommended change in policy. It’s that it’s crossing over from limiting the spread of scientific misinformation which I think is a good idea, to attempting to streamline people’s opinions about how bad the situation is and what a good solution would be. It’s crossing over from facts to opinions.

If someone claims that plants will benefit from the sudden change of climate zones, then that’s scientific misinformation alright. If someone says that they’re not worried about climate change and more worried about energy shortages, then that’s their opinion.  And depending on where they live that opinion might not be all that crazy.

Indeed, you could also argue that I myself count as a “new denier” according to this center, because I’ve made a video explaining why I think all current plans to reach net zero are almost certain to fail.

So let me say it bluntly, I am not in favour of a policy change of this type.  I am not happy of course that some people are making money peddling nonsense.  But the problem isn’t the few people who produce this content, it’s the many who watch it. The problem is that a big part of them *want misinformation.  They want misinformation -- consciously or subconsciously -- to justify conclusions that they hold dear, whether or not their reasoning is sound.

This is why I doubt that bans or demonetization are going to make much of a difference for the spread of misinformation: If there’s demand, there’ll be supply. Market forces alone won’t going to fix this issue because ads target the viewer, not the video creator.  This means brands don’t really need to worry that they will be associated with content that the viewer dislikes because the vast majority of people click on a certain type of content because they like stuff that like.

Personally I think that the best way to combat misinformation is with information.  I know that that’s very old school and that some studies seem to have found that people rarely change their mind when given new information. But I am somewhat, hmm, sceptical about the reliability of psychological studies.  

Also, the very fact that the old climate denial is on the decrease speaks against it. People do evidently change their mind when confronted with facts. But yes, scientific misinformation is a really difficult problem and it’s bound to get much worse as more AI tools become available. I hope that someone, somewhere knows a good solution because I don’t have one. Though, maybe you do? Let me know in the comments.