Disinformation Content Regarding Climate Change Increases On YouTube

JAKARTA The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit information filter company, says that the narrative of climate change is increasing on YouTube, but misleading.

In the past, people more often spread disinformation about climate change that did not occur or was not caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Now, such information will be hard to believe so that these deniers use a new strategy.

According to CCDH, people believe better in information that supports climate change. This is because billions of people have felt the real impact of climate change such as extreme heat, drought, forest fires, to major floods.

Therefore, these deniers pretend to support climate change. They create narratives of lies related to the use of environmentally friendly energy and some policies that are driven to reduce pollution.

These deniers also slander scientists and activists who are pushing for change by saying that their actions are causing climate change to worsen. In fact, all the narratives presented are not true.

To prove that the narrative of misleading climate change is increasing on YouTube, CCDH conducts innovative research with the support of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2023.

The results show that the narrative of misleading climate change has increased by 70 percent from previous years. This kind of rejection narrative only reached 35 percent in 2018.

Sadly, some of these misleading climate change narratives are still advertised even though YouTube has a policy that reads, "Prohibiting advertising and monetization of content that goes against scientific consensus."

CCDH CEO, Imrah Ahmed, said that bad information like this should not be allowed. Therefore, the non-profit company urged YouTube or Google to reject various monetizations of climate rejection content.