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Google's Greenwash: YouTube Violating Climate Denial Ad Policy With Over 73 Million Monetized Views [1]

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Date: 2023-05-02

Google's greenwashing its own image by allowing ExxonMobil and others to greenwash on YouTube

In October 2021, when Google announced a new policy against putting ads on climate misinformation, we called it a " small but serious win ," before our checks last fall and other research showed enforcement was lacking, to say the least. But that was just a glimpse.

Ads are being sold on climate disinformation YouTube videos with over 73 million total views, according to a new report by the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) . Among them? Ads for climate activist Jane Fonda's latest film, prompting the actress to tell the New York Times that she is "appalled that an ad for one of my movies appears on one of those videos, and hope YouTube stops this practice immediately."

Researchers compiled 200 YouTube videos that included climate denial and ran advertisements, including ads for major brands like Nike and even nonprofits like the Rainforest Trust. Over the course of the research, only eight of the 200 videos had their ads removed, demonstrating just how little Google is actually doing to enforce its policy.

100 of the videos break Google's very specific definition of climate misinformation, which applies only to denial of the existence or human causes of climate change. Those videos got some 18 million total views, proving that Google is still selling numerous ads on climate disinformation videos on YouTube.

But it gets worse! Google's definition excludes other forms of climate disinformation like greenwashing, false claims about climate solutions, and denial of climate impacts. CAAD researchers gathered another 100 YouTube videos with content that meets CAAD's definition of climate disinfo. Those videos got nearly three times as many views — over 55 million of the 73 million total views. So even if Google were effectively enforcing its policy, it'd still be exempting a much bigger portion of the problem.

Climate disinformation on YouTube didn’t come out of nowhere: The energy industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a network of disinformation producers. Furthermore, fossil fuel advertisers like ExxonMobil and Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future deliberately avoid blatant climate denial, instead creating more sophisticated greenwashing content. (And as a reminder, disinformation about a product’s harm is false advertising that is not protected by the First Amendment .)

Enforcing Google's policies is Google's responsibility. Google and YouTube employ thousands of people and have budgets bigger than most organizations can even imagine. Surely, if CAAD and CCDH can find tens of millions of views on content that breaks Google’s rules, the tech wizards employed by Alphabet are smart enough, and well-resourced enough, to find it too.

And Google certainly did find some of the videos, because it put ads on them! According to the researchers, 19% of the channels that posted the 200 climate disinfo videos are not part of YouTube's Partnership Program that allows them to split ad revenue with Google. That means YouTube put the ads on the videos and is getting all the revenue from the climate disinformation therein. Over a year after unveiling its policy that supposedly “aligns strongly with the work [Google has] done as a company over the past two decades to promote sustainability and confront climate change head-on,” Google is still actively profiting off of blatant lies about climate change.

Callum Hood, Head of Research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a press release that “despite Google’s green grandstanding, its ads continue to fuel the climate denial industry. Whether it’s taking cash to target users with climate disinformation, or running ads that make climate denial content profitable, the company is selling out. Tech companies make big promises on hate and misinformation because they know it’s hard to see if they’ve kept them. We need to force Google to open up the black box of its advertising business.”

“Google is supporting the climate disinformation they say they want to stop,” Friends of the Earth Climate Disinformation Spokesperson Erika Seiber added. “Disinformation persists because it’s profitable, and Big Tech needs to remove that incentive. Their business model relies on user engagement at the expense of the truth. Since Big Tech can’t answer the call from researchers and advocates for full transparency and accountability, lawmakers need to mandate it.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/2/2167074/-Google-s-Greenwash-YouTube-Violating-Climate-Denial-Ad-Policy-With-Over-73-Million-Monetized-Views

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