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Avaaz Report

Porque o YouTube está Compartilhando
Desinformação sobre mudanças climáticas
Para Milhões de Pessoas?

O YouTube está recomendando a usuários vídeos com desinformação sobre mudanças climáticas, e as marcas mais confiáveis do mundo estão pagando por isso.

16 de janeiro de 2020

Download da versão em PDF (em inglês) Voltar à página de Relatórios
Why is YouTube Broadcasting Climate Misinformation to Millions?

“Climate change is one of the most significant global
challenges of our time, and continued greenhouse gas
emissions pose an existential threat to humanity.”

Google 2019 Environmental Report

“There is no evidence that CO 2 emissions are
the dominant factor [in climate change].”

Richard Lindzen in Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say? -A video being
promoted by YouTube’s algorithm with 1.9 million views

Contents

Executive Summary


Climate misinformation threatens the health and safety of our societies and our planet. Protecting citizens around the world from fake news1 designed to confuse and poison the debate about climate change must be a key priority for governments, advertisers and social media platforms.

1http://archive.md/a9srx

Executive Summary

YouTube’s tremendous reach - and control over the content on its site - is unprecedented in media history. People around the globe spend2 a billion hours on YouTube every day, and the platform has two billion monthly active users, 3 which is more than all the households with TVs4 in the entire world. Even more significant when it comes to audience influence, YouTube is able to reach more 18-34 year olds than any cable network in the United States. 5 Today, YouTube is the preferred platform for teenagers, according to a recent study6 conducted by the Pew Research Center in the US, with 85% of teenagers (ages 13–17) saying they use the platform.

In 2015, YouTube launched a campaign7 to “help change the way people discuss climate change, so that the issue and its consequences could become more relevant and tangible to people around the world.” In addition, in Google’s February 2019 Whitepaper on fighting disinformation, YouTube’s parent company made it clear that: “We set out to prevent our systems from serving up content that could misinform users in a harmful way, particularly in domains that rely on veracity, such as science, medicine, news, or historical events. To that end, we introduced a higher bar for videos that are promoted through the YouTube homepage or that are surfaced to users through the “watch next” recommendations. Just because content is available on the site, it does not mean that it will display as prominently throughout the recommendation engine."8

With this report Avaaz set out to analyse how effectively YouTube is protecting its users from climate misinformation, and how well it’s implementing the commitments it made last February specifically around its recommendation engine.

For this investigation, Avaaz examined the videos YouTube recommends to users when they search “global warming,” “climate change,” or “climate manipulation.” Specifically, we focused on the videos YouTube suggests to users in its ‘Up Next’ feature, below the video on the mobile app, and as the next video in autoplay. These YouTube promoted videos drive the vast majority9 of what users watch on the site.

We found that YouTube is driving millions of people to watch climate misinformation videos. These climate misinformation videos aren’t just being uploaded to YouTube and organically seen by interested audiences. Instead, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is giving these videos free promotion and showing misinformation to millions who wouldn’t have been exposed to it otherwise.

Secondly, Avaaz found that YouTube is incentivizing this climate misinformation content via its monetization program. Every time an ad is shown on a YouTube video, the advertiser pays a fee,10 of which 55% goes to the video creator and the other 45% to YouTube.

Avaaz found that some of the largest household brands in the world, including Samsung, L’Oréal, Warner Bros, Carrefour, and Danone as well as two of the largest environmental groups in the world, Greenpeace International and World Wildlife Fund, have advertisements running on these climate misinformation videos.

2http://archive.fo/Dkygo
3http://archive.fo/BwINe
4http://archive.fo/g6Hrl
5http://archive.fo/D0hOY
6http://archive.fo/ZNnVh
7http://archive.fo/cNzAW
8https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/... see page 20.
9“YouTube's product chief says for 70 percent of the time you watch, you're riding a chain of recommendations driven by artificial intelligence.” https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-ces-2018-neal-mohan/
10http://archive.is/ZgoxE
11For further details on how Avaaz came to these findings, see the Annex.
12
See the Annex of this report for further details on how Avaaz defines “Related” and “Recommended” videos.

Key Findings of the Report 11

  • YouTube is actively promoting climate misinformation to millions of users:
    • For the search term “global warming, ”16% of the top 100 related videos included under the up-next feature12 had disinformation about climate change .
      • For the related videos recommendedto users who searched “climate change” this number equals 8% and rises to 21% for the search term “climate manipulation.”
  • The climate misinformation videos Avaaz reviewed had 21.1 million views collectively.
    • This is just the tip of the iceberg: Assuming a similar ratio for the thousands of other videos recommended through these and similar search terms, the total views on climate misinformation on YouTube likely add up to hundreds of millions .
  • Ads for some of the world’s most trusted brands were found on climate misinformation videos:
    • Avaaz was able to identify 108 brands running ads on these climate misinformation videos , including household names like Samsung, L’Oréal, Decathlon, Danone, Warner Bros and Carrefour.
    • One in five ads found were from green or ethical brands including Greenpeace International, WWF and Save the Children.
    • Greenpeace International, WWF, L’Oreal, Samsung, Danone, Decathlon, Carrefour, Ecosia, Nikin and Save the Children have confirmed that they were unaware that their ads were accompanying these videos and funding their creators.

The videos found and analysed in this report cover a broad range of misinformation themes, from videos titled “ACTUAL SCIENTIST: Climate Change is a Hoax” and “CIA Whistleblower Speaks Out About Climate Engineering Vaccination Dangers and 91113 to claims that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor in climate change.

Avaaz has classified videos as “climate denial and misinformation” if they contained verifiably false or misleading information that has the potential to cause public harm, such as undermining public support for efforts to limit human-induced climate change, as assessed against the scientific consensus represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, NOAA and other peer-reviewed scientific literature.

In recent years, YouTube has been repeatedly criticized for promoting conspiracy theories and pushing misinformation, and the company has introduced important reforms in response. In January 2019, YouTube pledged14 “to limit recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation, such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat.” In addition, in some countries, including the US, UK, Spain, Germany, South Korea15 and India16, YouTube is displaying information panels17 when people search for topics that are “prone to misinformation” — these consist of boxes of text that provide topical context from YouTube’s third party partners like Wikipedia.

Sixty-four percent of the climate misinformation videos Avaaz analyzed for this report were found to have an information panel from Wikipedia, containing general information about global warming. However, there was no flag to users that these videos contained misinformation and they were still being suggested by YouTube.

In order to effectively protect societies from this harmful misinformation, YouTube must take a more systemic approach. After consultation with industry experts, advertisers and legislators around the world,

Avaaz recommends that YouTube:

  • Detox the YouTube Algorithm -- The company must end its free promotion of misinformation and disinformation videos by extracting such videos from its algorithms, starting immediately by including climate misinformation in its borderline content policy.
  • Demonetize Disinformation -- Add disinformation and misinformation to YouTube’s relevant monetization policies, ensuring such content does not include advertising and is not financially incentivized. YouTube should start immediately with the option for advertisers to exclude their ads from videos with climate misinformation.
  • Correct the Record -- Work with independent fact-checkers to inform users who have seen or interacted with verifiably false or misleading information, and issue corrections alongside these videos.

Avaaz believes that YouTube has the opportunity to be a trailblazer in the fight against misinformation: the company is already committed to solving this problem and creating a better and safer information environment for its users. Now is the time for YouTube to act more systematically and more urgently to implement solutions, like the recommendations described above, to ensure this new decade is not plagued by the disinformation problems started in the last one.

Similarly, advertisers must both ensure that they follow through on their own corporate social responsibility commitments and track what kind of content their advertising revenue is inadvertently funding - and work with YouTube to be more transparent and socially responsible when it comes to where the platform places their brand names. Advertisers must establish detailed ethical ad placement requirements for platforms that include correcting the record and detoxing the algorithm. Avaaz commends the brands who have already begun this critical work.

13https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5NW9KcMt0
14http://archive.fo/hP7vz
15https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9004474?hl=en
16http://archive.fo/8pPhn
17https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9004474?hl=en

I. How YouTube
Promotes Climate
Misinformation

I. How YouTube Promotes Climate Misinformation

The instrumental role of the algorithm

Recommended videos are a key part of the YouTube user experience: According to18 the platform’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, 70% of the time users spend on YouTube is driven by the platform’s recommendations. In order to keep viewers on the site longer, the YouTube algorithm makes personalized19 recommendations to the user either in the form of videos on the platform’s landing page, as the “up next” video played after the video, or in the sidebar. These recommendations are meant to help viewers find content they might want to watch among millions of videos available on the site. However, there have been harmful unintended consequences to this model. For instance, for every climate misinformation video someone watches or likes, similar content is likely to show up in that person’s recommendations, thereby trapping the viewer in an online bubble of misinformation.20

For our investigation, Avaaz conducted a series of YouTube searches in English on three climate topics, collected the top results and queried YouTube APIs asking for the top related videos from these search results. In the end, we gathered a total of 5,537 videos. Avaaz focused on the following three search terms: “global warming,” “climate change” and “climate manipulation.” We chose the two neutral search terms (“global warming” and “climate change”) to analyse what type of videos would be recommended to an average YouTube user interested in the issue as well as “climate manipulation” as a more charged search term, which refers to the conspiracy theory that powerful corporations and governments are controlling the climate.Our full methodology is explained in the Annex.

The results of our investigation are clear: YouTube is promoting misinformation about climate change to millions. Sixteen percent of the top 100 videos detected by the YouTube API to be highly related to the initial video results for the search term “global warming” had misinformation about climate change. These related videos play a significant role in what winds up being recommended by YouTube in its “Up Next” feature and suggestions bar. For related videos based on the search term “climate change” this number equals 8% and rises to 21% for the search term “climate manipulation”. In total, the climate misinformation videos Avaaz found for this investigation had 21.1 million views.

% of Climate Change Misinformation Videos for Each Search Term

By focusing its recommendation algorithm on views and time spent on videos, YouTube has opened the door to promoting content whether it is misinformation or not as long as people keep watching. Our research also shows that this may have had an impact on virality and engagement: Over 20% of the views for the top 100 related videos for the search term “global warming” were on climate misinformation videos. For videos recommended based on the search term “climate change” this number equals 17% and rises to 27% for the search term “climate manipulation.”

18http://archive.fo/KrHyo
19http://archive.fo/KfqVO
20http://archive.ph/1YUJa

% of Views and Likes on Climate Change

Disinformation videos account for over 20% of views for YouTube videos related to global warming

Each circle is a video whose size is equal to number of views, and only videos with more than 500,000 views labeled.
Based on the top 100 related videos for global warming related search queries.

Misinformation videos account for over 20% of views for top 100 recommended videos for the search term global warming

II. Climate Misinformation
Videos on YouTube
& the Global Brands
Advertising on Them

II. Climate Misinformation Videos on YouTube & the Global Brands Advertising on Them
Image digitally created for visualization purposes only - @Avaaz
Image digitally created for visualization purposes only - @Avaaz

Avaaz found ads from a significant number of the world’s most widely recognized and trusted household brands and environmental companies and NGOs running on the climate misinformation videos we analysed for this report.

For Avaaz’s investigation into which brands had ads on climate misinformation videos, our research team focused in on the top 10 most viewed misinformation videos for the “global warming” search term, and the top 5 most viewed misinformation videos for the “climate change” and “climate manipulation” search terms respectively. Our intent was not to do a comprehensive examination but to get an overview of which ads tended to appear on the most trending videos recommended by YouTube.21

In total, Avaaz was able to identify 108 brands running ads on these climate misinformation videos. One in five of the ads shown were from green or ethical brands as well as public entities, such as Greenpeace International, WWF, Ecosia, Save the Children, the German Interior Ministry, and Eureciclo. Avaaz also found that 12.5% of the ads on the monetized videos were from household brands. In just two days of research and 10 viewings per video in six countries, some brands such as Aeromexico, Uber, Samsung, Decathlon, L’Oreal and Harley Davidson appeared over five times, sometimes over 10 times. For a full list of the brands and advertisements found by Avaaz during this investigation, see Annex 4.

It is crucial to understand that these ads are actually helping to financially incentivize the creation of climate misinformation content. Every time an ad is shown on a YouTube video, the advertiser pays a fee22, of which 55% goes to the video creator and the other 45% to YouTube.

Avaaz reached out to several of the companies and NGOs whose advertisements were found on climate misinformation videos. As of publication of this report, Greenpeace International, WWF, L’Oreal, Samsung, Danone, Decathlon, Carrefour, Nikin, Ecosia and Save the Children have confirmed that they were unaware that their ads were accompanying these climate misinformation videos.

21 For our full methodology, please refer to the Annex of this report.
22http://archive.is/ZgoxE

% of Ads Based on Types of Brand*

How Ad placement on YouTube Works

Several audience and content targeting methods23 for video ads are available to advertisers on YouTube, such as targeting based on demographic groups, interests, placements on YouTube channels or videos, topics, keywords, etc. One option for advertisers is automatic placement24 of their ads. Alternatively, advertisers can choose to have managed placement25 for ads, which is a targeting method advertisers can use to specifically choose websites, videos and apps that are part of the Google Display Network. Unlike the automatic placements, advertisers select managed placement themselves. YouTube provides content exclusion settings26 that let advertisers opt out of showing their ads alongside certain categories of websites, videos and mobile apps that may not be appropriate for their brand or serve their advertising goals. Such categories include sensitive social issues, tragedy and conflict, sexually suggestive content, and sensational and shocking content. All content creators who are part of YouTube’s monetization program -- meaning they have ads running on their videos that they earn money for -- must comply with advertiser-friendly content27 guidelines, otherwise advertising will be disabled on their videos. In reviewing YouTube’s relevant monetization policies, however, Avaaz was not able to find any direct mention of misinformation as a criteria for content where advertising is banned or disabled.

23http://archive.fo/OFSxm
24http://archive.fo/wlbcR
25http://archive.fo/9PPPA
26http://archive.fo/sBJ14
27http://archive.fo/65wJi


Below are a few examples of the monetized climate misinformation videos found by Avaaz as well as the advertisements that accompany them. Avaaz researchers reviewed some of the main claims made by each of these videos. Our team was easily able to find evidence confirming that these claims were verifiably false or misleading (ie misinformation) as assessed against the scientific consensus represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, NOAA and other peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Note: In some countries, YouTube promotes a Wikipedia article on global warming under some of the videos we found in this investigation, which is part of YouTube’s current effort to fight climate misinformation.28 However, YouTube does not give users an indication that the video itself contains misinformation. And, as this research shows, these videos are still promoted by YouTube’s algorithm.

28https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/youtube-climate-change-denial

Screenshot of a video with a Wikipedia information panel below it
Screenshot of a video with a Wikipedia information panel below it
Video Example #1

What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change 29

This video was uploaded on the PragerU channel, which has 2.31 million subscribers and claims to promote “Judeo-Christian values.” It is curated by the conservative30 talk-radio host Dennis Prager. At the time of Avaaz’s research in August, the video had been viewed over 2.6 million times since it was first published on July 27, 2015. Since August it has already racked up nearly an additional 1 million views.31 There are many claims in Moore’s videos. Here are a few of the main claims found to be verifiably false or misleading by Avaaz:

  • There has been no significant warming trend in the 21st century.
  • Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels do not show a strong correlation.
  • Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace.

NASA Earth Observatory32 has confirmed that: “The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability—and the preponderance of evidence says it’s humans— thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution...According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade... The line plot below shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2014 as recorded by NASA, NOAA, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre (United Kingdom). Though there are minor variations from year to year, all four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the last decade as the warmest.” 33

29http://archive.ph/fzK1T
30http://archive.ph/uUVxC
31As of December 12, 2019
32http://archive.ph/JktDU
33https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-ofchange/DecadalTemp

What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change
Annual Temperature Anomaly

The scientific community agrees that there are many factors that play into climate change, but Moore ignores the mountain of peer reviewed studies showing that changes in CO2 levels is the cause of past cooling and warming periods.

For example, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) concludes: "One of the most remarkable aspects of the paleoclimate record is the strong correspondence between temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere observed during the glacial cycles of the past several hundred thousand years. When the carbon dioxide concentration goes up, temperature goes up. When the carbon dioxide concentration goes down, temperature goes down." 33, 34

In a caption in this video it says Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace; however, Greenpeace has denied this, saying that “although Mr Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace.”35 In the past, Moore has been criticized36 for his alleged relations with the nuclear, timber and plastics industries and lobbies.

34https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change
35 Further sources: Jouzel, J. et al. Orbital and Millennial Antarctic Climate Variability over the Past 800,000 Years. Science 317, 793–797 (2007); Luthi, D. et al. High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present. Nature 453, 379–382, 10.1038/nature06949 (2008); Luthi, D. et al. EPICA Dome C Ice Core 800KYr Carbon Dioxide Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series # 2008-055. NOAA/ NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA (2008); Lacis, A. A., Schmidt, G. A., Rind, R. & Ruedy, R. A. Atmospheric CO2: Principal Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature. Science 330, 356–359 (2010); Came, R., Eiler, J., Veizer, J. et al. Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era. Nature 449, 198–201 (2007).
36Greenpeace have stated that: "Although Mr Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace." Greenpeace has said: "Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970." Mr Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-uscanada-47543905
37http://archive.ph/g45aQ

Eleven brands were found with ads on this video. See examples below of Danone, NIKIN and Ecosia’s ads

Danone Ad
A screenshot of a Danone ad on the “What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change” video. 38
Danone Ad

Danone is a French multinational food-products corporation. This ad presents Danone’s baby milk formula Aptamil. On its website39 Danone states: “Climate change is a profound, systemic challenge—not in the future, but right here, right now,” and that “Danone is meeting this challenge head on by committing to be carbon neutral by 2050 and co-creating carbon positive solutions.” Danone is a member of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.

NIKIN Ad

NIKIN is a fair and sustainable fashion brand based in Switzerland. They also invest in tree planting programs to counteract global deforestation41. In this advert, NIKIN promotes its clothing line explaining that for each product sold, one dollar is donated to reforestation projects all over the world.

38The screenshot of the ad taken during this research has been altered for the sake of design. Copy of the originals are available upon request.
39http://archive.fo/be4ER
40The screenshot of the ad taken during this research has been altered for the sake of design. Copy of the originals are available upon request.
41https://en.nikinclothing.com/pages/ baeume-pflanzen

NIKIN Ad
A screenshot of a NIKIN tree by tree ad on the “What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change” video. 40
Ecosia Ad

Ecosia is an internet search engine that donates a large part of its profits (80% in August 201943) to reforestation organizations. In this ad, Ecosia is promoting its search engine and explains its policy of reinvesting its profits in planting trees worldwide.

42The screenshot of the ad taken during this research has been altered for the sake of design. Copy of the originals are available upon request.
43http://archive.fo/zHfTW

Ecosia Ad
A screenshot of the Ecosia ad on the “What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change” video. 42
Video Example #2

The Truth About Global Warming 44

This video, an excerpt of a much longer interview with Dr. Patrick Michaels, was published on the Fox News channel. At the time of Avaaz’s research in August, this video had been viewed over 2 million times since its publication on October 21, 2018. Since then, the video has racked up an additional 460,000 views.45

There are many claims made by this video. Some of the core claims that Avaaz found to be misinformation include:

  • 31 of 32 climate models are flawed by design to vastly over-predict warming
  • Only half of global warming might be caused by human activity, beginning in 1976

As the video says: “There are 32 families of computer models that are used by the United Nations, each government sponsored. And all of them are predicting far, far too much warming...[the 31 models] are what is called parameterized. They're all parameterized, can I translate parameterized into English? Fudged. They don't get the right answer, don't know the right answer for a certain phenomena, so we essentially put in code steps that give us what we think it should be. And the systematic error that was made was the models were tuned, yes, I said, tuned.”

According to the IPCC: “There is considerable confidence that climate models p