In an effort to thwart climate misinformation, Google has announced that it will be updating its monetization policies on YouTube in order to ban content from climate change deniers.
Advertising and publishing partners, alongside creators, are now banned from making revenue from videos on the platform promoting information that goes against “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
This is including, but not limited to, referring to climate change as a “hoax” or a “scam,” denying that long-term trends indicate rapid warming of the planet, and claims that state that greenhouse gas emissions and human activity don’t contribute to climate change.
Google has decided to make these changes after it has received backlash from both advertisers and content creators alike. Advertisers don’t want their content to appear on videos that promote misinformation, and creators don’t want misleading advertisements to appear on their videos and pages.
In creating this new policy, the tech giant states that it has consulted experts to ensure that only accurate information is allowed to pass through. To enforce this, it has said that it will “look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim.”
“A combination of automated tools and human review” will be utilized to put the new measures in place, which Google states will start next month.
Content such as climate policy debates, the varying impacts of global warming, and discussions of new research will continue to be given the green light.
[via
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