Tuesday, June 11, 2024, 07:14
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According to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2023 became the hottest year on record. Greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise and the maximum extent of Antarctic sea ice was the lowest ever recorded. “Extreme weather events destroy lives and livelihoods every day,” declared WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in 2023. However, despite the evidence, there are groups that continue to deny climate change.
Social media platforms have established themselves as a digital technology capable of manipulating information at high speed and in large quantities. And, consequently, they are a perfect breeding ground for the transmission of false information. Due to their reach, they have become an increasingly powerful engine for misinformation and YouTube, the main vehicle for deniers to circulate disinformation content about climate change.
New denialist arguments
Those who seek to discredit climate science have changed their strategy in recent years because “since they cannot deny the obvious, the content that first denied the existence of climate change now denies that it is caused by man so as not to have to assume the consequences.” , says the professor of Information and Communication Sciences studies and specialist in disinformation and social networks, Alexandre López Borrull.
The analysis shows that climate deniers have moved from ‘old denial’ with claims such as that global warming is not happening and man-made greenhouse gases are not causing global warming, to arguments that Borrul classifies as ‘ new generation’. They include that the impacts of global warming are beneficial and harmless, that climate solutions will not work, and that climate science is unreliable.
“The sensible majority of us seeking to avoid a climate catastrophe find ourselves having to contend with a tidal wave of misinformation to delay action.”
Imran Ahmed
Executive Director of the Center for the Fight against Digital Hate (CCDH)
The right to freedom of expression, protected by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, includes the right “to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and opinions without limitation of borders, by any means of expression. This means that it allows the dissemination of information and ideas of all kinds, even those that may “shock, offend or disturb”, which complicates the task of mitigating misinformation.
The ‘new denial’, according to John Cook, a researcher on climate skepticism, constituted 70% of all denialist statements on the YouTube platform in 2023. A difference of 35% compared to 2018.
Google’s policy for YouTube creators prohibits advertising and monetization of “content that contradicts established scientific consensus on the existence and causes of climate change.” However, the platform policy only covers ‘old denial’ speeches but not current ones. This means that – the aforementioned study calculates – YouTube earns up to 13.4 million dollars a year thanks to these channels.
Media company Blaze TV, with 1.95 million subscribers on YouTube, went from the old to the new denial. It is clear that, at least since 2010, it has been promoting denialist messages such as that there had been “zero warming for more than a decade”, when, in fact, the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest up to that point, according to WMO data. .
In this video, the company’s founder states that President Biden’s government is using climate change as a cover to promote a restart and government control. He states that “they don’t care about saving the planet, they know that climate change is not going to kill millions of people around the world, it’s about gaining power and control over you.”
Glenn Beck
Another account highlighted by the research is that of Jordan Peterson, a psychologist and media commentator, who rarely posted climate denial content on his YouTube channel. However, starting in 2021 they skyrocketed. He has 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube. His videos are mainly interviews with climate opponents under titles such as ‘The Great Climate Scam’, ‘Killing the Poor to Save the Planet’ or ‘The Predictions Are False’.
Jordan Peterson interviews Canadian politician Danielle Smith. During his speech he says “in the terms that environmentalists themselves hypothetically appreciate, the idea that we can make the planet more habitable on the environmental front, impoverishing poor people, raising energy and food prices, not only “It is absurd, but I think it is equivalent to genocidal.”
Jordan Peterson
Climate denial has evolved and social media platforms are not keeping up with these new narratives. Although the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recognized this threat, the evolution of denialist discourses, according to the report, continues to be an understudied phenomenon, and they indicate that it is essential to address this gap to quantify and counteract it. the rise of the ‘new denial’.
This video features an interview with Patrick Moore (right), who was once associated with Greenpeace but has since called man-made global warming “fake news.” Moore claims that global warming is, in fact, “an upward tick in a downward movement.”
Chris Williamson
Impact of negative speeches
But what impact do these new arguments have on networks like YouTube? According to Saint Cornelius, the impact is “high.” The use of social networks by deniers is not coincidental. «The conventional media in general does not echo them, and everything fits into the networks. Furthermore, algorithms make it easier for one account to appear after another, ultimately creating that world of deniers,” according to Gemma San Cornelio, professor of Information and Communication Sciences Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and researcher at the Mediaccions group.
What they intend, adds López Borrull, is to “create a feeling of two opposing visions, equal and equidistant so that, when we have to talk about climate change, it is done with those who confirm it, but also with those who deny it.” For this reason, López Borrull recommends having “a plural media diet, following the maximum number of experts, and above all not trusting the arguments that anyone gives because they are an influencer.”
