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Google said Thursday it would cut advertising funds for YouTube videos and other content on its sites that include climate change denial, a major step for the tech company as scientists continue to warn humanity is increasingly approaching unprecedented levels of global warming.
“In recent years, we have heard directly from a growing number of our advertising partners and publishers who have expressed concerns about ads running alongside or promoting inaccurate claims about climate change,” wrote the advertising team at Google in a statement. “Advertisers just don’t want their ads to appear alongside this content. And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos. “
Offensive content will include anything that refers to climate change such as a hoax or scam, claims that deny the science that shows the planet is warming, or those that deny that greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels or other human activities contribute to climate change.
Ads and monetization will be allowed on other climate-related topics, Google said, including “public debates on climate policy, varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.” The company will use a mix of human review and automated tools to enforce policies, which will begin next month.
The tech giant added that it had consulted “authoritative sources” in drafting its new rules, including experts who helped draft the founding United Nations climate documents, the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC).
The New York Times notes that Google is already preventing certain types of content from earning advertising money, a process known as demonetization. Videos featuring gun-related content or those about tragic events are already excluded from digital revenue.
YouTube also announced last month that it would ban all content that included anti-vaccine content.
The latest IPCC report reaffirmed that the world is on a disastrous course, claiming that the planet has essentially been locked into intensive climate change for the next 30 years from the burning of fossil fuels. However, the worst effects of climate change can still be avoided through a dramatic and immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But the intensity of things is up to us, and scientists have long sounded the alarm that current commitments do not go far enough.
The Secretary General of the United Nations has called the latest findings of the IPCC a “red code for humanity”.
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