CCDH's new research shows that social media companies are letting falsehoods about extreme weather events like the LA Fires and Hurricane Helene spread unchecked on their platforms.
Climate groups and academics call on Google to extend its climate disinformation policy, demonetize and stop amplifying climate denial content, and collaborate with NGOs and academic experts to update its policies.
2023 was the hottest year on record, ever. Billions of people across the world experienced extreme heat, droughts, wildfires and major floods. Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening - so they’ve changed their strategy. CCDH’s groundbreaking AI-powered research shows that New Climate Denial narratives that aim to undermine the climate movement, science and solutions, now constitute 70% of climate denial content on YouTube in 2023.
CCDH and the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition found 200 videos on YouTube containing disinformation about climate change, with half of them directly breaching Google’s policy. In total, they were seen 73.8 million times.
For the first time, the Center for Countering Digital Hate comprehensively details how Google enables Big Oil’s greenwashing. We reveal that nearly half of the $23.7 million spent on Google search ads by oil and gas companies in the last two years have targeted search terms on environmental sustainability. The five companies studied in this report, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum (BP), Chevron, Shell, and Aramco, have polluted our search results while Google raked in their dirty money.
Our CEO Imran Ahmed provides written submission and evidence to UK Parliament Public Bill Committee for the Online Safety Bill. We analyzed the provisions of the Bill using our new “STAR” framework, which we developed for analyzing legislative efforts globally.
The science is undeniable - human activity is warming our planet at an ever-accelerating rate and leading to catastrophic climate change. Yet, ten publishers - The Toxic Ten - are spreading baseless, unscientific climate denial on their own websites and across social media. They are responsible for 69% of all interactions with climate denial content on Facebook. It's a climate denial propaganda machine funded in part by Google via ad revenue, and spread across the world via social media, in particular Facebook, who allow them to pay to promote their denial. We are calling on Facebook and Google to stop promoting and funding climate denial, start labelling it as misinformation, and stop giving the advantages of their enormous platforms to lies and misinformation.
Read our report on David Icke, the hate actor, conspiracy theorist and spreader of COVID misinformation. Icke has been embraced by Big Tech firms, which both power and profit from his hate and misinformation. The report also details Icke’s long history of using social media to promote his racism, attacking Jewish people, Muslims and migrants.