Last month, during the United Nations global climate summit, Google, the world's largest provider of online ads, made a big announcement: It would stop placing ads on sites that deny what scientists say about climate change.
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Google said that websites and videos that falsely claimed global warming was a hoax or scam were being blocked from profiting from its advertising program. Google ads are also no longer welcome: Content that falsely claims that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity are not contributing to climate change.
However, new research shows that Google's ad policy has had limited effect so far.
As of Wednesday, Google-placed ads were still running on many articles, including those on major right-wing websites like Breitbart, that called global warming a hoax and described last month’s United Nations climate conference as “a giant ecofascist lawn oil operation.” In fact, diplomats from nearly 200 countries struck a major deal to step up efforts to combat the grave risks posed by a warmer planet.
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a London-based nonprofit group, said Thursday that it had counted at least 50 new climate change denial articles on 14 different websites, all published after Nov. 9, when Google’s new policy was set to take effect. A previous report by the center’s researchers found that 10 of the most prominent publishers of climate change denial content had received nearly 1.1 billion visits in the six months leading up to the climate conference.
This is worrying because the ad revenue these denialist sites earn by showing Google ads helps fund more denialist content, said Imran Ahmed, the center’s executive director. “The more ad revenue they get, the more articles they can pump out and they can get them in front of as many eyes as possible,” he said.
Michael Aciman, a Google spokesman, said the company had reviewed the pages in question and taken “appropriate enforcement action.” Early Thursday, Breitbart climate change-denying articles that featured ads placed by Google stopped appearing.
The findings highlight how Google has struggled to rein in even blatant examples of climate change denial, experts said. The company's latest commitment comes amid mounting pressure on Google to stop monetizing the worst examples of online climate change denial.
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Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, has come under pressure to tackle election-related misinformation on its platforms, which include video-sharing site YouTube
Google said it uses a combination of automated crawling and human review to evaluate content, including YouTube videos. It typically disables ads at the page level, although egregious or persistent violations can trigger action against an entire site.
Source of information: nytimes.com
