Australian companies have been unwittingly paying to advertise on at least 100 YouTube videos that spruik climate change as a hoax or exaggeration, according to a new report that claims this violates Google’s policy banning creators from receiving advertising dollars from climate disinformation.
Some 200 videos were scrutinised by researchers from the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition, which found Google had failed to demonetise 50% of them as of Wednesday. With views exceeding 73 million and counting, the total ad dollar value could be as high as nearly $2 million, according to Crikey’s calculation.
But researchers said the 100 videos identified were the “tip of the iceberg”, and that a further 100 videos meet the CAAD’s definition of climate disinformation but were not captured by Google’s narrower definition in its misinformation policy, introduced in 2021.
Of the 200 videos analysed, seven were from Sky News Australia, with two — titled “Climate ‘scam’ an excuse for ‘greedy renewable investors to rip off taxpayers'” and “New sun-driven cooling period of Earth ‘not far off’” — falling foul of Google’s policy. Both featured paid ads, according to the research data.
In a video from 2013 from The Wall Street Journal, Competitive Enterprise Institute chairman Fred L Smith scoffs at then-secretary of state John Kerry’s “climate alarmism”, describing it as an “illusory dilemma” and a “quixotic” issue that may affect us “centuries in the future”. On Thursday, Crikey was served an ad for Booktopia, Sheridan and Allianz before the video played.
After being alerted of the ad, a Booktopia spokesperson told Crikey the bookseller would be working closely with Google on the “necessary measures” to ensure its advertising was not appearing on any climate disinformation content moving forward.
“It’s unfortunate that our advertising has appeared alongside this type of divisive content especially when we’re unable to completely control where and how our content is distributed with this type of advertising,” the Booktopia spokesperson said.
In a statement, Google spokesperson Michael Aciman confirmed it had quickly reviewed the report and removed ads from videos that violated the policy. This appears to have included the Sky News Australia videos, as Crikey could not reproduce the report’s result on Thursday.
Aciman said there were some challenges to “identifying and accurately enforcing on every unreliable claim” and that Google’s enforcement was “not always perfect”, though a “significant number” of videos the report said violated the policy had not done so, according to moderators’ views.
It’s just the latest example of YouTube’s moderation policies and practices being “too narrow and limited to encompass the kind of participatory conspiracy theorising that is common for health and climate topics”, Queensland University of Technology academic and disinformation expert Dr Timothy Graham told Crikey.
Google’s policy bans “claims that state climate change is a hoax, the climate is not warming, or that there is no clear scientific consensus on climate change”, as well as “claims that state there is no evidence that CO2 emissions or human activity contribute to climate change/global warming”.
But Graham said the policy still allows commentators or creators free rein to describe themselves as “just asking questions” while playfully engaging in conspiratorial-style thinking around a topic. It becomes a dog whistle for the unmoderated comments below, which create a “participatory culture” around the content.
For instance, he said, one of the videos linked in the report by far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson purports that global elites and mainstream media are conspiring to entrench wealth inequality by fabricating global hysteria every few years, with climate change the latest in a long history of deception.
One comment on that video reads: “The fact that we’re not surrounding these people’s houses and dragging them into the streets is astounding. You all do realize we could just do that, right?” It has 4400 likes.
Graham said it was reminiscent of language preceding the deadly January 6 Capitol riot in the US.
Despite leaps in algorithmic technology, the problem is getting rapidly worse, not better, QUT Digital Media Research Centre scholar and social media expert Axel Bruns told Crikey. Disinformation actors far beyond your average YouTuber in their garage are becoming increasingly sophisticated at “spreading their lies” without explicitly breaching any rules.
The problem is twofold, with the “continued presence” of content that breaks platform rules and the ongoing opportunities for such content to be monetised through the YouTube ads placed alongside disinformation.
Bruns said Australians need substantially more transparency from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and other major platform owners like Meta, about “their enforcement of content rules, their ad placement and content recommendation algorithms, and other aspects of their operation”.
Allianz was approached for comment.
