YouTube Makes Over $13 million off Climate Change Denial

3 years ago by Lee Duna to c/technology

Thousands of YouTube videos analysed over the past six years by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) show a detrimental increase in false and misleading statements about climate change.
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Avanera 46 points 3 years ago

The hell is going on with this article, is this bot-written? The top-line reads that the CCDH are the ones running the analysis. But the very next line reads "Streaming Platform YouTube said they analysed over 12,000 videos across 96 channels using an AI model crafted specifically to be able to distinguish between reasonable scepticism and false information." So it kinda sounds like this should be titled "YouTube study investigates changes in climate denial rhetoric, finds deniers are succeeding at skirting older protections." and then go on to explain that the new model inherently identifies this problematic content.

Listen, I'm not a big fan of Google, but as written this is just a shitty hit piece arguing in favor of an activist group that seems to be calling on YouTube to do the thing they've just said they already did. Unless the claim is that YouTube just went "Huh, weird. Guess we'll keep making money on it anyways!" and there's proof of that, this feels pretty deliberately misleading.

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thejml 18 points 3 years ago

Also, 12k videos is probably around a minute of typical content uploads. Seriously, in 2023, 500 Hours of content was uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is a minuscule study.

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Johanno 6 points 3 years ago

They used 96 channels as a sample it seems. So they can show that the new algorithm works. I think this is probably not going as well as they make it seem. Probably you will now face the problem that the word climate change will demonetise your video.

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Johanno 5 points 3 years ago

Yeah the CCDH is analysing youtube by reading the reports by YouTube itself.

The 96 channels were used to test the new algorithm???

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