I believe the statement "YouTube is riddled with false claims" applies to many hot-button and political topics, and likely applies to some even more so
than this one.

This message was from POPULARSCIENCE-CLIMATE-CH to ALL,
originally in conference TQW_GENSCI
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How YouTubes climate deniers turned into climate doomers

Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2024 17:00:00 +0000

The post How YouTubes climate deniers turned into climate doomers appeared first on Popular Science .

FULL STORY ======================================================================
YouTube is riddled with false claims.

Imagine if you could walk from your house to anywhere you needed to go in
less than 15 minutes: the pharmacy, the bakery, the gym, and then back to the bakery. In a certain, conspiracy-addled corner of the internet, this urban planning concept of 15-minute cities gets a shady, sinister gloss. Conspiracy theorists evoke COVID restrictions and tout efforts to create walkable cities as steps toward climate lockdowns. They warn of a plot by the World Economic Forum to restrict peoples movements, trapping and surveilling them in their neighborhoods.

They want to take away your cars, claims Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, in a YouTube video thats been viewed 1.7 million times.

YouTube is riddled with false claims like these, so its the place to document the evolution of arguments against taking action on climate change. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in
London and Washington, D.C., working to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that promoted lies about climate change
on YouTube over the last six years. Over that time, the reality of climate change long predicted by scientists has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. The report, released on Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from old denial argumentsthat global warming isnt real and isnt caused by humansto new arguments bent on undermining trust in climate solutions.

The success is that the science has won this debate on anthropogenic climate change, said Imran Ahmed, the nonprofits founder and CEO. The opponents of action have shifted their attention.

The report suggests that, rather than doing a victory lap, climate advocates may want to focus on defending climate policies and renewable energy as necessary and effective. As the world was besieged by intense heat, expansive wildfires, and catastrophic floods in recent years, YouTubers promoting disinformation increasingly embraced new denial narratives, such as that
solar panels will destroy the economy and the environment, or that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a fraud.

What it is doing is creating a cohort of people who believe climate change is happening, but believe theres no hope, Ahmed said. People start watching YouTube at a young agein 2020, more than half of parents in the U.S. with a child 11 years old or younger said their kid watched videos on the platform
on a daily basis. New polling from the center, released alongside the study, found that a third of U.S. teens say that climate policies cause more harm
than good.

Six years ago, these new denial claims made up 35 percent of deniers
arguments on YouTube; now, they make up 70 percent of the total. The fastest-growing assertions were that the climate movement is unreliable and that clean energy wont work.

To get this data, the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed video transcripts from nearly 100 YouTube channels that spout climate denial, using an artificial intelligence tool to categorize the arguments.

One popular source is the channel of Jordan Peterson , a Canadian
psychologist and culture warrior with 7 million followers. In an interview
with Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Epstein
makes the case that climate advocates cant be trusted. Listening to a modern environmentalist is like listening to a doctor whos on the side of the germs, somebody who doesnt have your best interests at heart, Epstein says in a
video entitled The Great Climate Con thats been viewed a million times, reiterating a point once made in the 1990s by the economist George Reisman in an article titled The Toxicity of Environmentalism .

The report also points to the libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute and the media company BlazeTV, created by the former Fox News host Glenn
Beck, as prominent sources of lies about climate change on YouTube. Videos
from PragerU , a right-wing media outlet also known for spreading disinformation, paint solar and wind power as dangers to the environment and compare environmental activists to Nazis. Despite what the name may imply,
its not actually a university, nor does it offer any degrees .

John Cook, a researcher at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change in Australia, has documented a similar rise in attacks on climate solutions by conservative think tanks and blogs . Its surprising to see misinformation on YouTube shifting so quickly, Cook said in an email.The future of climate misinformation will be focused on attacking climate solutions, and we need to better understand those arguments and how to counter them.

Some research has shown that climate disinformation is compelling: A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that its often more persuasive to people than scientific facts. And once people latch onto a falsehood, they find it hard to let go. Thats why stopping disinformation at the source is so important, according to Ahmed. The key right now is ensuring that we arent flooding our information ecosystem with nonsense and lies that make it more difficult for people to work out whats true or not, he said.

Together, the YouTube channels that the center focused on garnered 3.4
billion views last year. And all those views means theres money involved: The report found that YouTube is potentially making up to $13.4 million a year in ad revenue from channels that post climate denial.

Google, which owns YouTube, promised in 2021 to ban ads on its platforms alongside content that contradicts the scientific consensus that climate
change is happening and caused by humans (though it hasnt enforced it well ). To counter the latest wave of disinformation, the Center for Countering
Digital Hate recommends that Google should also prohibit advertisements on content that pushes misinformation about climate solutions, so that YouTubers wont be incentivized to publish more of it. (Content creators who partner
with YouTube receive a share of the ad revenue .)

If it wasnt profitable, would so many people see it as being a business to produce bullshit? Ahmed said. Were asking platforms to not reward liars with money and attention.

The post How YouTubes climate deniers turned into climate doomers appeared first on Popular Science .

Link to news story: https://www.popsci.com/environment/youtube-climate-change-deniers/


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