Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

Enlarge (credit: PM Images | DigitalVision)

Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube's policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.

What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading "old" forms of climate denial—including claims that "global warming is not happening" or "human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming"—have moved on.

Now they're increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that "impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless," "climate solutions won’t work," and "climate science and the climate movement are unreliable."