Google, YouTube to Prohibit Monetization of Videos Featuring ‘Climate Denial’ Content
“we’ve heard directly from a growing number of our advertising and publisher partners who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change”
YouTube and its owner Google, announced this week that they would no longer permit monetization on videos featuring climate denial. That’s a nice way of saying that disagreeing with progressives on climate change is on its way to becoming a thoughtcrime.
What step do you think comes next?
Sara Fischer reports at Axios:
Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content
Google and YouTube on Thursday announced a new policy that prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments.
Why it matters: It’s one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation.
Details: Google advertisers and publishers, as well as YouTube creators, will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” the company’s ads team said in a statement.
- “This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”
- Ads and monetization will still be allowed to run alongside other climate-related topics, like public debates on climate policy, impacts of climate change, and new research around the issue.
The company claims this decision was driven largely by advertisers. Call me a denier, but I simply don’t believe it. These companies are run by social justice warriors of the left and I think that ideology drives every decision they make.
This is just the next step in censoring anyone the left believes is spreading so-called misinformation. Of course, those rules didn’t apply for the four years under Trump when every liberal news outlet was spreading a conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with Russia. Is the monetization coming off of those videos too? How about all the 9/11 conspiracy theory videos?
Here’s part of the official statement from Google:
Addressing climate change denial
In recent years, we’ve heard directly from a growing number of our advertising and publisher partners who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change. Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content. And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.
That’s why today, we’re announcing a new monetization policy for Google advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators that will prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.
When evaluating content against this 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. We will also continue to allow ads and monetization on other climate-related topics, including public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.
This is censorship, plain and simple.
Slippery slope starting to look like a tobbogan ride to complete censorship. https://t.co/MzrFhVbDsX
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 7, 2021
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Comments
Climate Science denial comes first. They have no adult peer review.
The stuff ought to be reviewed by experts in the tools they use, e.g. hydrodynamics, time series statistics, not by other climate scientists.
As it is, the original mistakes are normalized as good practice and continue to this day.
Actual geophysics papers (the ancestor of climate science) expressed curiosity, something you will find none of in climate science of today. Curiosity is sort of a hallmark of science.
Example of geophysics paper when science was science
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2416238
Skepticism is also a hallmark of science.
“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”
“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”
― Richard P. Feynman
Climate science is not now, nor has it ever been, populated with scientists. It is a made up science specifically for activists.
One of their biggest problems is none of their several increasingly complex models have made accurate predictions. They’ve all been wrong. With one very minor exception. One of their models predicted there was about a 1% chance that something would happen that actually happened.
I expect pointing this fact out will now be censored by YouTube and Google.
That’s even after they started ‘adjusting’ the raw data to make it more ‘accurate’.
Not a track record any legitimate scientist prior to the late 20th century would take seriously. Instead they would be told to go back to the drawing board and come back when they could do much, much better.
Who controls the past controls the future” is a quote from Orwell; Key Takeaways
“Who controls the past controls the future” is a quote from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, “1984.”
The novel describes a dystopian future, where all citizens are manipulated by a single political party; lets name names = the Democrat Party
Orwell was writing when information was being controlled by a minority of people, and his novel contains references to Nazi Germany, though present-day woke America and the Democrats align with the Nazis, the USSR’s Communist Party. Ditto for China.
The quote still reminds us that it is important to identify the sources of the information we receive.
When Google relocates away from coastal CA to avoid the ravages of rising sea levels to say Kansas then I might take them seriously.
Dude, why do you hate Kansas?
So how about to Missouri (Red legs) instead of Kansas (Jayhawks) then? I thought the ‘recent unpleasantness’ had ended some time ago. /
And when Obama and his fellow fascist elites stop buying oceanfront estates.
Exactly. You don’t see anyone unloading their property on Martha’s Vineyard at bargain-basement prices.
Our radical leftwing fascist Regime’s censorship campaign marches on. Aided and abetted by Big Tech.
Once begun such a censorship campaign never ends. As time goes on the censors find more and more to censor. They can’t help themselves. They are authoritarians and totalitarians and have the power they require. Imagine what will be censored and off limits by the 2024 election season.
In parallel a huge black market, so to speak, for censored information and ideas will grow. The more free speech and the free exchange of information and ideas is suppressed and censored the greater the demand.
The only possible end game for the censors, including the government censorship apparatchiks, are to put offenders in prison, re-education camps, and an American Gulag. The US will become like Communist China and the Soviet Union.
In the long run they cannot win. But in the long run we’re all dead. And in the short run anything can happen.
Will the American people stand up for their rights and their freedom? Will they rise up to the greatest threat and challenge to their freedom since the founding of the nation? We shall see.
If they do the fascists will not like what happens to them.
They were forced to do what they wanted to do anyway.
Their Gaslighter told you that.
It’s just gonna get worse. Get off facebook. Get off twitter. Get off google. Get off youtube.
Those people hate you. Why support them?
TBH, a number of “extremist” (really, who isn’t “extremist” these days??) content creators saw the writing on the wall some time ago, switching over to other video platforms and other forms of monetization.
The creator of YouTube should have never sold out.
What constitutes “Climate Denial”? Would Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” count? Would articles by Steve McIntyre count? Roger Pielke, Jr.? Do the same criteria apply to stories that say sea levels could rise 20 feet by 2050 or that CO2 is not a plant fertilizer? How about articles that assume RCP8.5 is a highly likely scenario?
I’m old enough to remember when Antitrust laws were actually enforced. It’s long past the time when it should have been broken up.
Google and Youtube would have de-monetized Galileo and Copernicus because the consensus of scientists of the day was that everything revolved around the Earth.