Despite a worldwide consensus among researchers and policymakers, climate denial has not gone away. Politicians on the right and fossil fuel lobbyists continue to try to convince people that environmental policies are unnecessary and harmful. But a recent study of climate denial online shows that the deniers are changing strategy, and social media companies are not keeping up.
Research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) indicates that this matters. In a poll, they found that, among people who reported high levels of social media activity, 43% of adults and 56% of teenagers agreed with the statement “Humans are not the main cause of global temperature increases”
From ‘Old Denial’ to ‘New Denial’
The Centre’s latest study has explored how climate denial has been promoted online. They used new Artificial Intelligence tools to analyse transcripts of 12,058 videos from 96 climate denial YouTube channels. Together these had been viewed 325 million times.
The CCDH report ‘The new Climate denial’ found a change in approach over six years. They described this as a move from ‘Old Denial’ to ‘New Denial’. ‘Old Denial’ claimed that climate change is not happening, and human-generated greenhouse gases are not causing global warming. By contrast, ‘new deniers’ no longer claim that nothing is changing. In the face of the evidence which people see in the news almost daily, they no longer deny that change is happening. Rather, they now claim that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless; that climate solutions won’t work; and that climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.
The report found that New Denial, which formed only 35% of claims in 2018, now constituted 70% of claims, promoted by some influencers like Jordan Peterson.
Social media companies not keeping up
The change in strategy is also a response to the efforts of some social media companies to block climate denial. Content creators earn money from advertising on social media sites, and in 2021 Google, which owns YouTube, announced that it would no longer allow monetisation of climate denial claims. A YouTube spokesperson said:
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”
However, their tools for intercepting Old Denial claims do not catch the New Denial claims, and the researchers found that some old ones still escape scrutiny. The report estimates that YouTube is still making up to $13.4 million a year from advertisements on the channels they studied. Advertisers may not know where their advertisements appear. But advertisers on sites linked to denial content included Hilton Hotels, Save the Children, and the International Rescue Committee.
And the controls which do exist are weak. Currently, Instagram and Facebook leave it up to third-party fact checkers to identify posts and advertisements that deny the existence of climate change. They remove advertisements and limit the reach of content only after they have been flagged by the checkers. TikTok’s policy is restricted to removing Old Denial content and does nothing to address New Denial, while Twitter/X has no official policy towards content or advertising that pushes Old Denial or New Denial claims.
Social media platforms provide content creators with rich data to help them understand what works and doesn’t in attracting views, and hence generating money. Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s chief executive, pointed out that this is effectively encouraging the deniers to devise ever more ingenious ways round the rules.
Need for better controls
The report makes recommendations to a range of social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter/X.
It calls for all platforms to update their policies to keep up with New Denial narratives, and to make more effort to demonetise and de-amplify climate denial content. They argue that:
To support the global efforts to avert climate disaster, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X should all demonetise and de-amplify New denial content. Demonetising climate denial removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content. Moreover, de-amplifying climate denial limits its reach and visibility, allowing time for fact-checking and other protective measures to be applied where content is clearly contrary to the well-established scientific consensus on climate change.
If climate advocates and policymakers fail to recognise this shift, they risk losing the information battle necessary to deliver climate solutions.
Stop press
Since this article was written, Rishi Sunak appeared at a protest meeting against the Welsh Government’s farming policy, alongside campaigners against net zero policies and climate denying conspiracy theorists.
