great platform for videos world YouTube —owned by Google— is failing in the control of the disinformation about climate change. A research conducted by the non-governmental organization Avaaz and released this Thursday, shows that YouTube drives millions of people to watch videos of disinformation climate every day.” Although this NGO admits that the platform has made some improvements, the algorithm of recommendations remains an ally of the conspiracy theories about global warming. And your system leading to ads of major companies and, even, of recognized environmental NGOS such as WWF or Greenpeace accompany this type of videos intoxicadores.
“we Demand YouTube to stop recommending and promoting content desinformativo pernicious,” Julie Deruy, coordinator of campaigns of Avaaz. This activist, denies that his organization seek censorship. “This content,” says in reference to the videos with misinformation about global warming, “can remain on YouTube, but should not be recommended or promoted among users.” “We want a debate, equal and healthy, based on facts,” he says. But “the algorithms of the platform prioritize content outrageous and addictive, and the climate change deniers are using the holes in the system to promote lies, viral, putting in danger the ability of people to maintain a sensible discussion”, explains Deruy to THE COUNTRY via e-mail.
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“Our recommendations are not designed to filter or degrade videos or channels in function of specific views”, it has been argued that this Thursday Google. In any case, the company ensures that it has made investments to “reduce the content recommendations and limit the information to be erroneous or harmful”.
For five months, with about thirty members of this organization and the external specialists have analyzed more than 5,500 videos hosted on the multimedia platform. This is the video that recommends to its users in the section of “next” and in the suggestions bar. To reach them, they set out three searches (in English): “global warming”, “climate change” and “manipulation of climate”. And the result of this research suggests that between 8% and 21% of the first 100 videos recommended contain “misinformation” about the climate crisis that is the planet. The search that less content intoxicadores offers is “climate change” and the “manipulation of climate”.
For their research, the members of Avaaz have been classified as “denial climate and misinformation,” the contents that were verifiably false or misleading and that they have the “potential to cause public harm, such as undermining public support for efforts to limit climate change”. And to this end have advantage of the research published by the IPCC —the group of international scientific advisors of the UN in the field of climate change, NASA, NOAA and peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Negationism sponsored
But the investigation of the Avaaz goes a step beyond and also claims that many of these videos deniers are accompanied by announcements of large international companies, or, even, of environmental NGOS, who have spent years leading the activism against climate change. The study has identified ads of more than one hundred businesses linked to those videos intoxicadores. “Samsung, L’oréal, Decathlon, Carrefour, WWF, Greenpeace Spain, Nikin and Ecosia have confirmed to Avaaz who were not aware that their ads appear next to these videos”, it explained in the study. “All of these companies have demanded YouTube to take immediate measures”, says Avaaz.
The inclusion of these ads implies a way of funding for that negationism through the “program of monetization” for YouTube. “Every time an advertisement is displayed in a YouTube video, the advertiser pays a fee of which 55% goes to the creator of the video and the other 45% to YouTube,” explains the research.
This platform, like Google, is aware of the problem of poisoning and conspiracy theories for years. In fact, in February of 2019 Google issued a document on the way in the fight against the disinformation in which assures that you are implementing measures to ensure that their “systems” do not disseminate contents that may “misinform the users in a manner harmful”, especially on issues related to “science, medicine, news or historical events”.
“It’s a good first step, but it is not at all sufficient”, says Julie Deruy. “The company should start by detoxifying their algorithms, which means to redesign them so that the misinformation and the contents harmful do not recommend to users,” he explains. Avaaz has put on the table a list of recommendations. And, according to Deruy, the first step that you should give YouTube is to define “clearly, denial of the holocaust of climate disinformation,” and that offers “immediately to the advertisers the option to exclude their advertising from the videos that contain misinformation about climate change”. For its part, Google has stated that “YouTube has policies ad standards that govern where to allow ads to show” offers “advertisers tools to rule out the content that does not align with your brand.”
