Google Will Ban Fake Climate Change Propaganda Content

Ilustrasi foto (Markus Spiske / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Google will ban all ads claiming that climate change is fake. In the future, these ads will not appear next to other site content. The move is expected to limit income for climate change deniers.

The company said the new policy will also apply to YouTube, which last week announced a crackdown on vaccine misinformation. It aims to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform.

"We've heard first-hand from a growing number of our advertising partners and publishers who have expressed concern about ads running alongside or promoting inaccurate claims about climate change", Google said in its official blog, quoted from USA Today, Saturday, October 9.

According to Google, content creators and ad publishers on YouTube don't want ads promoting false claims about climate change to appear on their pages or videos.

"(We) will ban advertising and monetization, content that goes against time-tested scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change", Google said.

Google's new policy will be placed on content that calls climate change a hoax or denies that greenhouse gas emissions and human activities have contributed to Earth's long-term warming.

Google said it would use automated tools and human reviewers to enforce the policy when it goes into effect in November. Earlier this week, Google also rolled out new features aimed at helping users reduce their carbon footprint, including a search function that shows which airlines have lower emissions.

Compiled from BBC Internasional, a 2020 report by Avaaz, a US nonprofit that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, accuses YouTube of incentivizing this climate misinformation content through its monetization program.

Fadi Quran, who runs the Avaaz disinformation project, told the BBC that it could turn the tide of the climate denial economy, "With three weeks left for the critical Glasgow summit, and climate misinformation rising to undermine it, other social media platforms must quickly follow suit. Google's leadership", said the Quran.

Stopping the monetization of the content does not remove or reduce its popularity. But Google will do both, and strive to provide authoritative information, even when people are looking for conspiracies related to climate change.