Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, May 17 (Xinhua) according to the New York Times, in October 2021, Google announced that it would no longer advertise false content denying the existence of climate change, including videos on YouTube. As a result, people who spread these false information will not be able to make money from Google's platform. However, a new report shows that Google is not systematically implementing its own policies. Google still makes money from playing videos full of climate-related lies on YouTube.

The report was jointly released by Friends of the Earth and environmental groups such as the Anti-Digital hatred Center, and the researchers accused YouTube of continuing to profit from videos describing climate change as a hoax or exaggeration. They found 200 videos that violated Google's own policy and garnered more than 7400 views, of which 100 met Google's definition of climate-related misinformation, which explicitly denied the existence and causes of climate change. These videos show advertisements from many well-known companies and brands, including Costco, Politico, Nike and so on.

"it really calls into question Google's current level of execution," Callum Hood, research director of the Anti-Digital hatred Center, said in an interview. The researchers say it is difficult for them to assess the full picture of error messages on YouTube because it takes a lot of time to watch videos, and they can only use keyword search platforms and do not have sufficient data access. Hood added: "I think it's fair to say that what we found is only the tip of the iceberg."

Environmental activist Jane Fonda said in a statement that YouTube's practice of showing videos and ads that climate change was a hoax was "abominable" and violated its own policy. "I am shocked by the appearance of ads on those videos and hope that YouTube will stop this practice immediately," she said.

Although Google failed to implement its own policy, the researchers found that its policy itself was not good enough. There are also 100 other videos that meet the Alliance's more robust and clear definition of false information, which have been viewed at least 55 million times, proving that such content is very popular. Google's policy is too narrow to apply only to the worst false content, denying that human activity is the cause of climate change.

CTOnews.com learned from the study that at the end of the several-month study, only eight videos had been removed by Google, although some of them had been around for several years and slowly accumulated millions of views. When Fonda, Grubhub and others criticized Google, Google began to further remove ads from content, and very quickly, but there are still a large number of fake videos that can still display ads.

According to the New York Times, the fake content persists because it is profitable, and big technology companies give priority to click-through and viewing at the expense of the truth. In order to prevent the spread of false and misleading content, without effective supervision, online platforms need to eliminate the financial incentives behind the generation and dissemination of misinformation.

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