10 mo. ago • 95%

Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

arstechnica.com Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

Majority of climate-denial content posted now does not violate YouTube's policy.

Technology @lemmy.zip Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

31 comments

There's no denying what happened after the pandemic started....no fucking flight noise, no car noises, fresh air. It was a sort of soundscapes utopia. You could actually hear the birds chirping their asses off from happiness.

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We're never actually going to win this arms race. We need a structural solution. Perhaps we could look into, maybe, decentralizing social media so no single algorithm ends up controlling huge chunks of it?

Might be worth a shot anyway, I dunno.

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- this was the original intent behind the internet. but big platform with big ad support makes big money.
  
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  ISPs limiting upload speeds to tiny fractions of download speeds is to blame.
  
  0
  
  Enshitification of the Internet itself???
  
  That surely started in its early days (because it was not mainstream accessible, only when it got to that point that process started).
  
  -3
- I support opposing misinformation directly. Hold the authors accountable by making them justify what they say against actual published science. Press them with punishment and make them change their tune. At this point they are a cancer killing humanity and we should have very little humanity left for them.
  
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- AFAIK this doesn't work well with video because storage is way too expensive and most people cannot afford it.
  
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- Hmm that could work 🤔
  
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if we could just get rid of the idiots waving flags and bibles... it's almost as if they're destroying the entire world with their ignorance.

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- They're literally a death cult.
  
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  Historically, speaking, fascism goes hand-in-hand with death cults
  
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- How about destroying the people actually responsible? You know, like those who gave them those flags and bibles, and created the systems that indoctrinate them in to blindly worshiping both?
  
  And also not being ableist while we're at it.. (E: better link)
  
  -4
  
  the ignorant masses are the one actually responsible. they want bibles and flags. the grifters making a profit off of it would be easily legislated into oblivion if there weren't masses of cruel idiots that provide a support base.
  
  and if calling stupid out is ableist, then i'm un-apolegetically guilty of being ableist.
  
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  We should do both. But at some age we must hold people accountable for their decisions.
  
  These aren't children. These people want flags and bibles and things to hate. If they didn't, they'd stop consuming them.
  
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Yeah YouTube monetizes anything with a drama clickbait title, ghost-dick-in-the-mouth-face, red arrow and circle bullshit. But then again, people click on it, so it's our own fault. It's just like that seo crap, people fall for it and rotten people know how to game the system.

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- "These people used as much visual manipulation as they could cram into this photo/title to get people to click on it. It's the fault of those being manipulated that it's being clicked on"
  
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  At least we stopped blaming rape victims, but we still need to blame scammers for the scum that they are.
  
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  You've got a point. However I believe a good amount of people are intelligent enough to see through the ruse, yet endulge in it, in a fastfood kind of way. Oh, I don't know. Don't read into it too much, I'm just ranting a bit, because I find the whole thing annoying.
  
  5
- agape-mouth is how I immediately tell if a channel is bullshit or not.;
  
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  deleted
  
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- Basically every Ali-A video.
  
  1
- I've switched to either Invidious or Piped so I avoid most of those problems.
  
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Generally speaking all of the climate change deniers that I'm familiar with in everyday life, they have fully transitioned from "its not happening" to "its happening but doesnt matter because (pick one) A. It's just a sign of the end times of my religion. B. It's just a cycle and there's nothing we did to cause it or can do to stop it.

Once again the goal posts get shifted and we see them admit to something and then fall on yet another reason why we shouldn't concern ourselves due to the real reason that they just don't give a shit.

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Denialists. Denialists. Is that new?

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.

But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube's ad policies.

Currently, YouTube's policy prohibits monetization of content "that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content "that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change."

"It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly," the CCDH's report said, adding that "demonetizing climate-denial" content "removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content."

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