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Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content
- hirundo 5y agoThere is no need for this to be asymmetrical. Why not also include overly enthusiastic alarmist content, like announcements that we're all going to die real soon now. It seems to me that this sort of message can also be very damaging in terms of transmitting hopelessness and short-termism. Better would be to restrict neither. But it feels unbalanced to only suppress the nuts from one wing.
- drcongo 5y agoAlternative headline: Google makes climate denial content on YouTube much more appealing.
- Bostonian 5y ago"Google said it's making these changes in response to frustration from advertisers and content creators about their messages appearing alongside climate denialism." Then why not give advertisers the option to avoid putting their ads next to climate denialism, as opposed to demonetizing such videos entirely?
- Splendor 5y agoMaybe because no advertisers have requested that ability.
- camhart 5y agoHow could they have, this is a brand new change. I doubt they asked all advertisers there opinion. The assumption that all advertisers are in agreement on this topic is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
- lliamander 5y agoThat seems doubtful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beezischillin 5y agoI distinctly remember advertisers saying they would put their ads on demonetised content featuring guns after they banned ads from such so it’s not impossible that some advertisers would be okay with their ads on some controversial content.
- munk-a 5y agoIt'd be interesting to see Google decide to charge a premium for ads on climate denial videos - pass on no more than the normal share... and put the extra earnings towards fighting climate change. Essentially: a climate change denial tax.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- superfist 5y agoso looks like now advertisers vote what is science ;)
- worrycue 5y agoAdvertisers pretty much decide what get monetised on YouTube if you think about it - the money YouTube gives out is advertiser money after all.
- nicce 5y agoWhat if climate denialists want their ads next to these videos? Who is getting prioritized?
- postingawayonhn 5y agoThe people with the money. Obviously.
- nicce 5y agoOf course. It seems that I missread and this was all about advertisers, not about content creators.
- belltaco 5y agoIf that is true then why don't you or someone start a video sharing site for such advertisers who want to advertise next to such content?
- monkeymagic69 5y ago2 seconds after starting said site thousands of sock puppet accounts on Twitter declare it a racist website, payment networks cut you off and the creators are doxxed and slandered all over social media and the news
- boppo1 5y agoWhat's the threshold for denialism? If I think climate change is man made but the threat is probably overblown until manhattan real estate prices start to come down, am I a denier?
- xqcgrek2 5y agoThe threshold is whatever Google thinks it is, or rather, whatever the panel of 20-somethings communications or sociology BAs they've hired to mod their platform think it is.
- weakfish 5y agoI agree, but you're edging on strawman there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- version_five 5y agoThat's usually the argument against censorship. You may have noticed though that in the last couple years we have moved into a regime of information control where a loud group would rather we only have access to one narrative about things. In this case, it seems more of a commercial decision, but as another poster pointed out, you'd think advertisers could just opt out of being opposite certain content. Currently as an advertiser, do you get any choice? What about videos about drug use or medical advice or whatever that I imagine all advertisers don't necessarily want to be associated with?
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoThere are some things where advertisers do just get an opt-out, but Youtube's existing content policies have a blanket prohibition against "harmful health or medical claims" with no advertiser choice available. (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278, "Harmful or dangerous acts" section)
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- Alupis 5y agoThe core of science is debate. There is no singular truth for most things in the scientific world, and lots and lots of shades of "the truth". We're straying very far away from a nation that believes in actual science - and we're replacing it with some quansi-religion called "Science" - a belief system where nobody is allowed to think or say anything that might contradict or challenge "the truth". How many times have you read a headline saying something along the lines of "Scientists say..."? As-if all scientists have come to exactly the same conclusion, when the reality is it was one person or one group saying something. What exactly even is a scientist? Are computer scientists qualified to speak about climate change? Probably not... yet we never know exactly what types of scientists are proclaiming things - just trust them, they're scientists! There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything... eggs are bad for you - no wait, eggs are good for you - no wait, only 1 egg a day - eat as many eggs as you can! Nobody agrees on eggs - how can we have agreement on far more important and challenging-to-study things like the climate? The truth is there is no consensus so censoring half (or more) of the discussion is downright absurd.
- lapetitejort 5y ago> There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything Scientists agree that at low velocities, the force of an object equals the mass times the acceleration. This is just one point of agreement. There are others that I can't list here. You may be surprised at the amount of info that scientists agree upon.
- molbioguy 5y agoIt's not sufficient to cherry pick an example of agreement to refute the original comment. There are obviously many things scientists agree on, but there are also many complicated things scientists disagree on, especially when it comes down to the details. The key point is that the public tends to treat science and scientists as monolithic in their views. The truth is far different and there is an enormous amount of diversity in thought and lots of debate within the scientific community on many, many topics.
- zdragnar 5y ago
- perihelions 5y ago>"The tech giant says that when evaluating content against the new policy, "we’ll 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." This is obviously an unrealistic and impossible moderation task (at Google-scale), and they're plainly lying if they claim they can do that. Clear evidence: YouTube took down a podcast by a member of President Biden's Covid advisory board -- spectacularly failing the use/mention distinction test (about the subject of anti-vaccination sentiment). Their misinformation classifier does not pass the Turing test. Specifically, it can not "differentiate between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim". (Michael Osterholm's Episode 61, "Divided by Delta", if anyone wants to research further. It was reinstated in a few days). (late edit) Here's a source: https://twitter.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 https://twitter.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 and a bio: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/about-us/cidrap-staff/michael-t-osterholm-phd-mph https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/about-us/cidrap-staff/michael-t-o...
- Craighead 5y ago"N=1 proves my argument" Gosh why does HN continually fall for this type of absolute drivel.
- darkhorn 5y agoYes, probably they are going to use ML to classify if content has some kind of climate change denial. There could be some persantage that will be evaluatef wrongly by the AI. That is okay, I mean it cannot be perfect. Some Youtubers will loose their channel just becaouse they said somwthing about climate change. At the and everyone will stop talking about climate so that they don't fall under false positeves.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 5y agoThe point is they're saying completely different: they claim they look at context, and they claim that they can handle use/mention distinctions. State of the art ML can't do that. They're soliciting buy-in from the general public, with assurances that they know are false.
- DantesKite 5y agoMy professor made a pretty good criticism of the “hockey” stick graph climate change scientists often referred to, showing how it was just bad science. Would criticisms like that be demonetized for climate denial content? Seems like it would.
- imtringued 5y agoI don't understand how a 50% increase in CO2 levels within 100 years is bad science.
- flavius29663 5y agothe hockey stick is about temperature, not CO2, and it's pretty shoddy. It uses current day pretty accurate data to estimate past proxies like corals and tree rings. But it combines all of them in a graph that is not really accurate. Much better temperature reconstructions have been made available.
- Aerroon 5y agoConsidering YouTubers were afraid of simply mentioning words such as "covid" and "virus" in their videos I'd say that it'll have a chilling effect whether YouTube gets it right or not. And I have little faith in YouTube getting it right.
- wavesounds 5y agoDo you think your professor would really care about monetizing his video? This rule seems to strike a good balance, you can still criticize the orthodoxy all you want but Google's not going to pay for it. It takes the incentive away from charlatans profiting off of misinformation.
- maxk42 5y agoIt also takes incentive away from the scientist with an unpopular or unique hypothesis. That stifles innovation.
- michaelterryio 5y agoSo, what us promoters of free speech read this as is, “anything that qualifies the unified messaging of the dominant orthodoxy is banned.” Anthropogenic global warming is of course true. But there is an absolute metric ton of shit to qualify about the messaging and particular facts, claims, and policies around it. Some of this qualification will come from adversarial debate where the policy opponents are mostly wrong, but still provide some nuggets of truth. Now I know that YouTube cannot be trusted to host this discussion.
- edgyquant 5y ago> But there is an absolute metric ton of shit to qualify about the messaging and particular facts, claims, and policies around it. And a lot of the doomsaying is as unscientific as denying climate change
- throwawaysea 5y agoVery true. The doomsayers are part of a cohort that feels like a left-leaning QAnon, but they have somehow avoided that label and enjoyed legitimacy. Those who try to draw nuance on the topic of climate are often viciously attacked for it. For example a blog post claiming that climate change is a serious issue but not an existential threat (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-existential-threat.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...) resulted in activists trying to pressure this university into firing this professor. Meanwhile, children who have repeatedly heard doomsayer messaging are experiencing extreme anxiety to a point where it is affecting their daily life and function (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/four-in-10-young-people-fear-having-children-due-to-climate-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/four-in-...). Of course, none of that messaging will be subject to fact checks, demonetization, or bans.
- edgyquant 5y agoIt isn’t just children, I’ve heard plenty of adults say they believe the world will be basically destroyed in 30 years and have heard countless others say they aren’t having children because climate change will be so bad they don’t want to subject them to the hellish conditions expected.
- beezischillin 5y agoSo does this apply in this case as well: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-partner-videos-but-wont-pay-the-creators.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-... ?
- sp332 5y agoUnderstandable. Debate is nice and all, but self-defense is justifiable.
- throwawaysea 5y agoI am completely exhausted by these large private monopolies becoming arbiters of speech. They have too much power and play too big a role in controlling our politics. Democracy isn't just the act of voting - it also involves everything that comes before it, and if you have massive platforms that bias their audiences through algorithmic/policy interference, it ultimately amounts to interference in our democracy. In a world where most of society's speech takes place on these platforms, we need to treat them for the common carriers they are, as UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh put it (https://shapingopinion.com/is-big-tech-a-common-carrier/ https://shapingopinion.com/is-big-tech-a-common-carrier/), and regulate them. To get more specific, this decision is going to result in Google drawing arbitrary, indefensible lines based on the perspectives their employees and leaders deem allowable. For instance, can a content producer monetize their perspective that the Pacific Northwest heatwave from June was not primarily caused by climate change? There were numerous headlines claiming that this heatwave was "virtually impossible" without climate change, quoting a paper that was not peer-reviewed. But the paper itself admitted that a record breaking heatwave would have taken place even without climate change, and this point was made by others such as Atmospheric Sciences Professor Cliff Mass at the University of Washington (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-report-leads-to-false.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...). So whose opinion is allowed in that situation? Who gets monetization that biases the world towards that perspective and who gets drowned out? Who gets a fact check or context label that casts doubt on their content and who doesn't? Apparently, the world we've accepted, is one where a small number of Silicon Valley progressive elites decide all of that for the whole world.
- munk-a 5y agoA while back a representative of one of the major US political parties said that "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." - when the government is constantly defunded more power is handed to private corporations. Somebody has the authority at the end of the day - you can't have a vacuum of authority - since the government has been restricted from actually being responsible for reasonable platform creation we've ended up in this bad timeline where mega-corps are the arbiters of speech instead.
- rdtwo 5y agoOdd, I would think a lot of companies would target this Demographic. If I’m selling knives, trucks, atvs, boats, hunting and fishing supplies, farm equipment these are my people. It would seem like a great Demographic to for advertisers. I don’t understand why they would censor it.
- t0bia_s 5y agoThose steps of regulation of opinions is silly and eventually eat itself. Problem is that with big tech centralisation and data surveillance we are vanurable to ideology in global scale more then ever in history. Whole covid agenda is proof of it.
- notarget137 5y agoI'm fascinated how private companies just casually decide on what truth is and what is not.
- mcphage 5y agoThey don’t need to decide what is truth, they just need to decide what ideas they’ll pay people to spread. Probably something they should have thought about years ago, but better late than never.
- seomint 5y agoIt seems to me the last recourse of any weak science and its zealots is to stifle conversation and rigorous debate. The winner here will be Patreon.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoThanks, Google! A supra-legal, unelected, international body to outsource my censorship to is what I always wanted!
- ladyattis 5y agoI really get a bad feeling from having Google making these blanket policies considering how they've bungled up lesser moderation attempts in the past. Maybe this is a sign for Google to break up the YouTube video service into a federation of platforms rather than just a one-size fits all approach. I know that sounds impossible and maybe it is from a brand recognition point of view but I think forcing all their content streams into one platform has been causing them more problems than it solves. They can still use the same advertising network and associated API but they really don't need to push everything through one website.