YouTube is turning a buck from ads on videos that are spreading misinformation about climate change, Euronews reports, citing a new report by the Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The report found 200 climate disinformation videos on the platform that had ads by major brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Hyundai running on them.

What kind of misinformation is being propagated? The videos’ content ranged from outright climate denial, skepticism about the models and work of climate-focused organizations, the denial of a link between carbon generation and global warming, to conspiracy theories associating climate science with “communist”, “anti-white” and “anti-Western” agendas. The content scrutinized by the study collectively garnered some 74 mn views as of late April, Euronews noted.

Google’s failure to combat disinfo: The presence of ads on the videos cited in the report — found by searching terms like “climate hoax” and “climate scam” — is in direct violation of Youtube's policy banning adverts on content “contradicting authoritative scientific consensus on the existence of and causes behind climate change.” The reports also found that nearly 63% of “popular climate denial articles still carry Google ads,” the news outlet writes. In 2021, YouTube’s parent company Google said it would ban “ads for, and monetisation of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Problems with the terms of service: Youtube has a very narrow definition of what it considers climate disinformation, according to the report. “We need more robust, coordinated and proactive strategies to deal with the scale of the threat to platforms,” the news outlet quotes the researchers as saying.

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