Google said it would stop selling ads on climate disinformation. It hasn’t
What do Jane Fonda and Grubhub have in common? Both have had their work inadvertently advertised next to videos full of climate lies and have said they aren’t happy with Google about it. Fonda said in a statement she was “appalled” and found it “abhorrent that YouTube would violate its own policy (while) the earth is burning.”
In October 2021, Google announced it would no longer sell ads on climate denial content, including on YouTube. But a new report from my group, the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, shows Google has failed to systematically enforce its policy.
Google continues to sell ads on YouTube videos peddling climate lies with millions of views.
Coalition researchers found ads running on 200 YouTube videos that spread climate disinformation. These ads have attracted over 74 million views — 18 million of them came from 100 of the videos that meet Google’s definition of climate misinformation, which applies only to explicit denial of the existence and causes of climate change. Ads on these videos included well-known businesses and brands including Costco, Politico and Nike.
But even as Google fails to enforce its own policy, researchers found that it’s not that great of a policy to begin with. An additional 100 videos meet the coalition’s more robust and clear definition of disinformation that covers greenwashing, paltering and other tactics to delay action. Those videos have collected at least 55 million views, proof that this kind of content is definitely popular. Google’s policy is so narrow that it applies only to the most egregious flat-Earther content that denies that human activity is causing climate change. This approach exempts savvier content from Big Oil and its lobbyist friends, allowing them to peddle the obvious lie that fossil fuels are a solution to climate change and not part of the pollution driving it.
By the time the months-long research concluded, only eight of the videos had advertisements removed even though some of the videos had been around for years — and slowly accumulating millions of views. Once Google was called out by Fonda and GrubHub, and gained access to our data about what was on its platform, it finally began to demonetize content further and very quickly at that.
Within a day, out of the 100 videos we found that fit within Google’s policy parameters, 79 more were demonetized. Of the 100 videos that fit the coalition’s definition of climate disinformation, an additional 18 were demonetized. Prior to the release of our research, the eight videos Google had taken ads off of had around 2 million views. The day after the release of our research, 103 videos were taken down, representing an additional 15 million views.
Unfortunately, this progress is still overshadowed by the 57 million views on videos that Google is still selling ads on. Tucker Carlson’s lies are acceptable to YouTube as well as a video falsely calling the 97% scientific consensus on climate change a “myth.” Climate lies are being woven into COVID lockdown and “great reset” conspiracy theories and are rewarded by Google with ad revenue. ExxonMobil’s greenwashing gets a green light from YouTube, as do other fossil-fuel-front group videos, along with now-fracker-backed Jordan Peterson.
But it wouldn’t be hard for YouTube to protect viewers from this harmful false content. The 200 videos came from 96 channels, and if Google were to act on just the top 10, it would account for nearly 62 million views. Going just a little further, the top 25 channels account for a full 71 million of the nearly 75 million total views. Just a little effort would have an outsized impact because climate disinformation mostly comes from obvious sources: the fossil fuel industry and people it has funded to prevent policy that could address its pollution or profits.
Why was a small group of researchers more effective in catching ads on climate lies than a $1.3 trillion Big Tech company? Why won’t Google expand its policy to include all forms of climate disinformation? Why does Google support the same problem it claims it wants to stop?
Disinformation persists because it’s profitable and advances the agenda of the fossil-fueled status quo. Big Tech’s business model prioritizes clicks and views at the expense of the truth. In order to put an end to the spread of false and misleading content, Big Tech needs to remove the financial incentives that drive it. Without meaningful regulation, disinformation around climate change and climate-change-related disasters will persist and grow. States like California could see the worst of it as disinformation around the cause of wildfires runs as rampant as the fires themselves.
If Big Tech won’t step up, lawmakers in Washington, California and around the world need to step up and mandate it. Clearly, companies like Google can’t be trusted to keep their promises.
Erika Seiber is a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth and for the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition.
