YouTube is the leading source for climate change denial on the Internet

Updated July 2021

YouTube has a long history of making bizarre decisions, for instance they terminated our first climate science focus channel, citing spam, scams, and deceptive content, back in 2017. In 2018 they stopped recommending all our weather extreme related content, often not even listing them in the search.

Then in January 2019 they demonetized the Climate State YouTube channel without notification, warnings, or prior notices – a channel in good standing. YouTube also declined to let us challenge a copyright strike, even though it should be clear when viewing that video.

YouTube cites reused content policy violations when they demonetized us, which means lack of commentary or educational value. Those extreme weather videos we have created often were the only one mentioning climate change, how is this not an educational value? How are summaries, carefully selected segments, with improved audio quality, massive edits and added content around the sciences and events, not educational?

Most YT climate videos do not align with basic climate science

YouTube is 90% used for entertainment, science and climate science are niche topics, and according to a recent 2019 study most of climate change videos oppose the scientific consensus on climate change, or hijack technical terms to make them appear more credible.

The videos were then assessed to judge how closely they adhered to the scientific consensus, as represented by the findings of reports by UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2013 onwards. These concluded that humans have been the “dominant cause” of global warming since the 1950s. However, Allgaier found that the message of 120 of the top 200 search results went against this view.

YouTube remains the largest source of climate denial on the internet

• Most YouTube climate change videos oppose the consensus view
• YouTube’s top related videos have a climate change denial problem
• YouTube ads of 100 top brands fund climate misinformation
• Why is YouTube broadcasting climate misinformation to millions?

Read how YouTube is making it difficult for other channels, YouTube, We Have a Problem.

Does this make YouTube a Climate Villain?

YouTube is the largest video platform, the largest website with Google and Facebook, and if you browse climate videos it won’t take long until YouTube even recommends climate denial, arguments which have been proven false.

YouTube is also the largest place on the Internet for climate denial – mostly videos from fossil fuel funded anti science sources, spreading rumors and lies. These kind of videos outnumber climate science videos.

Climate State

We have created over thousand videos since around 2012, trying to make an impact, essentially communicating the sciences, but YouTube staff claims that our videos have no educational value.

Then we tried to please YouTube by removing videos we have only slightly edited, we removed 300 videos, then another 300, and then another 300 videos.

To be clear, our content was perfectly fine, we had the rights to publish most of the content to our channels. Only a small amount of content was posted on a fair use basis, and this was never an issue with YouTube.

There are now about 80 videos remaining, will YouTube staff decide that these videos have educational value?

• YouTube actively promotes climate denial
• Cut our revenue (terminated our channels)
• YouTube staff opposes climate science, pushes content attacking the sciences

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RELATED

• YouTube, We Have a Problem (June 2021)
• YouTube Terminates Climate State