Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content | Hacker News Reader

Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content

axios.com

141 pointsra7160 comments

>"The tech giant says that when evaluating content against the new policy, "we’ll look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim."

This is obviously an unrealistic and impossible moderation task (at Google-scale), and they're plainly lying if they claim they can do that. Clear evidence: YouTube took down a podcast by a member of President Biden's Covid advisory board -- spectacularly failing the use/mention distinction test (about the subject of anti-vaccination sentiment). Their misinformation classifier does not pass the Turing test. Specifically, it can not "differentiate between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim".

(Michael Osterholm's Episode 61, "Divided by Delta", if anyone wants to research further. It was reinstated in a few days).

(late edit) Here's a source: https://twitter.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496

and a bio: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/about-us/cidrap-staff/michael-t-o...

Google doesn't care to pass the Turing test. Their goal is to suppress any and all discourse skeptical of the official line. A few false positives are not a problem. Even better, the subjects learn that nothing and nobody will pass the censor wall. Don't even think unclean thoughts, are you a mass murderer?

Yes, probably they are going to use ML to classify if content has some kind of climate change denial. There could be some persantage that will be evaluatef wrongly by the AI. That is okay, I mean it cannot be perfect. Some Youtubers will loose their channel just becaouse they said somwthing about climate change. At the and everyone will stop talking about climate so that they don't fall under false positeves.

The point is they're saying completely different: they claim they look at context, and they claim that they can handle use/mention distinctions. State of the art ML can't do that. They're soliciting buy-in from the general public, with assurances that they know are false.

The distinction of context could be drawn via human moderation.

I think they will set a flag that states if a channel is news. News channels get to report on questionable material without triggering ML, or at least get a human review at some point.

Non-news channels would get regular ML.

If you sort the channels talking about climate-change by views, then you can manually vet the top few thousands and use ML for the rest. You can also do graph analysis to classify channels based on common viewers, starting with a seed of manually labelled channels and the graph.

That sounds like a recipe for ensuring today-small, potentially future major channels never talk about climate change

So, what us promoters of free speech read this as is, “anything that qualifies the unified messaging of the dominant orthodoxy is banned.”

Anthropogenic global warming is of course true. But there is an absolute metric ton of shit to qualify about the messaging and particular facts, claims, and policies around it. Some of this qualification will come from adversarial debate where the policy opponents are mostly wrong, but still provide some nuggets of truth.

Now I know that YouTube cannot be trusted to host this discussion.

> But there is an absolute metric ton of shit to qualify about the messaging and particular facts, claims, and policies around it.

And a lot of the doomsaying is as unscientific as denying climate change

Very true. The doomsayers are part of a cohort that feels like a left-leaning QAnon, but they have somehow avoided that label and enjoyed legitimacy. Those who try to draw nuance on the topic of climate are often viciously attacked for it. For example a blog post claiming that climate change is a serious issue but not an existential threat (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...) resulted in activists trying to pressure this university into firing this professor. Meanwhile, children who have repeatedly heard doomsayer messaging are experiencing extreme anxiety to a point where it is affecting their daily life and function (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/four-in-...). Of course, none of that messaging will be subject to fact checks, demonetization, or bans.

It isn’t just children, I’ve heard plenty of adults say they believe the world will be basically destroyed in 30 years and have heard countless others say they aren’t having children because climate change will be so bad they don’t want to subject them to the hellish conditions expected.

I've met people like that as well, but what's interesting about them is that what they say and do is more akin to cult-like behavior than a sincerely considered belief. If they actually believed that the world was going to end in 30 years (or whatever it is this week) they'd quit their tech job and learn how to hunt, do subsistence farming, and go off the grid. None of them - in my experience - do any of this, and merely get irrationally upset and worried about something they themselves have zero control over rather than prepare for said event they think is inevitable.

Hi, I'm a real person who probably is a rough approximate of the imaginary strawman you're talking about in this post.

I'm not going off to become a subsistence farmer today... because that has literally nothing to do with being concerned about increasingly severe wildfires, more destructive hurricanes, more severe droughts or floods or loss of viability of farmland over the coming years and decades.

The climate crisis doesn't mean we're going to wake up tomorrow in some post-apocalyptic fantasy you're imagining where people will be hunting deer with bows & arrows. It means a lot of different bad things will continuously happen- the border & immigration crisis will get worse as Central American farms struggle under worse weather, wildfires will mean more evacuations and worse air quality, 'natural disasters' of hurricanes or blizzards or flash floods that would happen once-per-century will happen once-per-decade.

The rational thing to do isn't to go LARP as a post-doomsday survivor in the woods, the rational thing to do is to vote for policies to reduce carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy and try to educate the scientifically illiterate about the dangers of inaction.

Do you ever write in order to learn, or to test your ideas? I do this sometimes. The idea is to assign yourself a project, e.g., to write a blog report demonstrating that hurricanes are becoming more destructive. I think you might find it surprising if you did that and relied on the rawest, most objectively true data you can find, rather than articles by the BBC.

There's a ton of space between "the world will be basically destroyed" and "conditions will be pretty bad for many people in the next few generations", but that space is kind of hard for many of us to imagine or talk about.

Where are you from?

I’m from Southern Illinois, but I live in Seattle

not the parent, but I've heard similar justifications in London

Ah yes. Sounds like Western "problem". Glorification of death in wealthy civilization is beginning of their end. Immigration proofs that.

Note that "existential threat" has a technical meaning which excludes things that cause the collapse of your economy, livelihood, and way of life, as well as causing hundreds of millions of people to die. So, "climate change is not an existential threat" doesn't contract even the claim that climate change is the most serious threat that humanity currently faces. :-)

But it's also true that pretty much no scientists believe that climate change is an existential threat, and also true that people can be punished for pointing that out.

Climate change is very much an existential threat.

Do you remember the political crisis in Europe created by the Syrian refugees? Those were about 6 million people. How do you think our political systems and societies react if there are several hundred millions on the run?

Think of this post again when you see governments collapse because of waves of desperate migrants trying to get somewhere they can survive.

You become a doomsayer by appealing to “think of the children” and their anxiety.

Children have been stressed by disease, poverty, nation state politics… prove it is avoidable before making it a problem.

Of course the environment doomsayers must be silenced, right? For calling for action and change, rather than “stay the course I know to avoid anxiety” which you seek to feel is even achievable despite truths of physical reality.

Like… one of these platforms has merit. And you’re annoyed by it, so let’s be anti-speech. Because then the problem just goes away.

If by "existential threat" you mean a threat to existence, there are already many species going extinct today, which is why it is said we are in a 6th mass extinction:

https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-6th-mass-extinction...

Droughts and floods are also affecting many parts of the world today. And "At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows:" (IPCC)

https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/

Beyond 2C and nearing 4C, the extreme events are expected to yield larger crop failures and migration events.

The US military has also called climate change "a serious threat", stating "while extreme weather events and rising sea levels threaten infrastructure and economic output, trigger large-scale population displacement, migration and exacerbate food and water insecurity."

https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2021/05/14/

And the Defense secretary did call it existential:

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...

So it does seem fairly existential to me. How exactly is this being nuanced? I have also only linked respectable sources above.

All of that being said, I also share the opinion from others above that a single corporation unilaterally deciding what is or not acceptable speech should be unacceptable.

Maybe this is just a semantic debate, but I (and likely most people) interpret the phrase “existential threat” in the context of climate change as referring to humans. As in, humanity/civilization will not survive the predicted climate changes. However, the worst case scenarios are not extinction of humans but rather death in the millions to hundreds of millions, assuming we don’t adapt in various ways.

Well, for all those hundreds of millions it will indeed be existential (and I have read that a 4C Earth could only be able to host ~1 billion people, so the deaths could be a lot more than "millions to hundreds of millions".) In any case, arguing about the technicalities of the word "existential" at this point denotes such a complete lack of empathy that it's not even worth it.

Even the deaths of hundreds of millions requires a number of worst case scenarios to happen, which isn’t all that likely.

> Now I know that YouTube cannot be trusted to host this discussion.

It never was in the first place and that you think that it was demonstrates the fundamental issue at hand - people give more weight than they should to information coming from YouTube videos.

That's clearly untrue based on their statement. It's only demonetizing blanket denials.

> content that states a false claim as fact

is far from a blanket denial. They will arbitrate individual claims, apparently, and decide which claims are true and which are false. Google now decides what climate science is instead of scientists.

> Some of this qualification will come from adversarial debate where the policy opponents are mostly wrong, but still provide some nuggets of truth.

I highly doubt that. It's tiring and frustrating to debate people who are not constrained by existing data or logical consistency. Such debates will not help making policy decisions, just slow it down.

If anyone has "nuggets of truth," it's their responsibility to read up on the current understanding of the climate, review their position, and build a persuasive case.

>So, what us promoters of free speech read this as is, “anything that qualifies the unified messaging of the dominant orthodoxy is banned.

Thanks for proving that promoters of misinformation are bad at reading comprehension and spread misinformation on basic facts.

Not being able to monetize != banned.

My professor made a pretty good criticism of the “hockey” stick graph climate change scientists often referred to, showing how it was just bad science.

Would criticisms like that be demonetized for climate denial content? Seems like it would.

Considering YouTubers were afraid of simply mentioning words such as "covid" and "virus" in their videos I'd say that it'll have a chilling effect whether YouTube gets it right or not. And I have little faith in YouTube getting it right.

I don't understand how a 50% increase in CO2 levels within 100 years is bad science.

the hockey stick is about temperature, not CO2, and it's pretty shoddy. It uses current day pretty accurate data to estimate past proxies like corals and tree rings. But it combines all of them in a graph that is not really accurate. Much better temperature reconstructions have been made available.

Do you think your professor would really care about monetizing his video? This rule seems to strike a good balance, you can still criticize the orthodoxy all you want but Google's not going to pay for it. It takes the incentive away from charlatans profiting off of misinformation.

It also takes incentive away from the scientist with an unpopular or unique hypothesis. That stifles innovation.

You think people putting content on youtube are doing it for fun? Neither fun or passion pay the bills

What's the threshold for denialism? If I think climate change is man made but the threat is probably overblown until manhattan real estate prices start to come down, am I a denier?

The threshold is whatever Google thinks it is, or rather, whatever the panel of 20-somethings communications or sociology BAs they've hired to mod their platform think it is.

That's usually the argument against censorship. You may have noticed though that in the last couple years we have moved into a regime of information control where a loud group would rather we only have access to one narrative about things.

In this case, it seems more of a commercial decision, but as another poster pointed out, you'd think advertisers could just opt out of being opposite certain content. Currently as an advertiser, do you get any choice? What about videos about drug use or medical advice or whatever that I imagine all advertisers don't necessarily want to be associated with?

There are some things where advertisers do just get an opt-out, but Youtube's existing content policies have a blanket prohibition against "harmful health or medical claims" with no advertiser choice available. (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278, "Harmful or dangerous acts" section)

I wonder too. What if you believe and have models that say:

1) yes CO2 warms the atmosphere. This is reproducible.

2) the climate will warm.

3) but it doesn’t really matter according to these particular models.

It turns out there are climatologists that have models they interpret this way. Are they banned? Is this denialism? Do you have to agree it’s a “crisis” or can you agree it’s happening but it doesn’t make a big difference

> yes CO2 warms the atmosphere. This is reproducible

Sorry, but we don't have a control group Earth to test this hypothesis.

(Would be nice, but...)

You can easily reproduce that an atmosphere higher in CO2 gets warmer without having a second Earth, you don't need a full planet to test a single atmospheric effect. What you can't do is quantify that to a meaningful measure in the context of Earth. We have no way of knowing if X more CO2 will cause Y warming, or if 2X CO2 will cause 2Y warming or 10Y or .5Y. We can be very certain tat more CO2 means warmer, but how much or how bad isn't clear.

> you don't need a full planet to test a single atmospheric effect

Yes, you absolutely 100 percent do. The atmpsphere is a complex, non-stable systems with feedback loops. It does not reduce to a sum total of atmospheric effects.

Just can't monetize the videos, not banned.

> It turns out there are climatologists that have models they interpret this way.

Won't be a problem when AI starts understanding scientific papers.

There is no need for this to be asymmetrical. Why not also include overly enthusiastic alarmist content, like announcements that we're all going to die real soon now. It seems to me that this sort of message can also be very damaging in terms of transmitting hopelessness and short-termism.

Better would be to restrict neither. But it feels unbalanced to only suppress the nuts from one wing.

The core of science is debate. There is no singular truth for most things in the scientific world, and lots and lots of shades of "the truth".

We're straying very far away from a nation that believes in actual science - and we're replacing it with some quansi-religion called "Science" - a belief system where nobody is allowed to think or say anything that might contradict or challenge "the truth".

How many times have you read a headline saying something along the lines of "Scientists say..."? As-if all scientists have come to exactly the same conclusion, when the reality is it was one person or one group saying something.

What exactly even is a scientist? Are computer scientists qualified to speak about climate change? Probably not... yet we never know exactly what types of scientists are proclaiming things - just trust them, they're scientists!

There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything... eggs are bad for you - no wait, eggs are good for you - no wait, only 1 egg a day - eat as many eggs as you can! Nobody agrees on eggs - how can we have agreement on far more important and challenging-to-study things like the climate?

The truth is there is no consensus so censoring half (or more) of the discussion is downright absurd.

The core of science is debate. There is no singular truth for most things in the scientific world, and lots and lots of shades of "the truth".

Science isn't done by youtube video battles but by debates in scholarly journals. Youtube is a medium for popularizing whatever content. Youtube seems well in its rights in banning content it considers harmful and in this case I'd agree with this ban.

That's not to say youtube's effective monopoly isn't concerning. I'd rather see ten providers but I'd like to see them all ban climate change, antivax and similarly noxious content - make people interested in the subject read long texts instead.

Video isn't good medium for sustained, coherent debate. In this instance, it's a means of broadcasting shallow propaganda to morons, or put less insultingly, those not using rational facilities to decide things.

> but by debates in scholarly journals.

And these debates should be open. It's incredible how hard getting data on clinical studies are vs. here our culture of open source.

>Science isn't done by youtube video battles but by debates in scholarly journals.

As a scientist, I would prefer more open discussion. Because the conversations scientists have with each other is not what ends up getting told to the public, and many agendas impact that.

Most scholarly journals are open. Moreover, anyone with a dissident opinion can publish an alternative journal and these certainly exist.

You know the climate change denial videos on youtube aren't "getting things in the open" but slick sales jobs for a particular viewpoint.

> Science isn't done by YouTube video battles but by debates in scholarly journals.

That's a lot of confidence to have in a very broken system given the replication crisis, ineffective peer review process, excessive and pervasive paywalls, and general high barrier to entry.

Youtube is actually pretty great platform for lots of science and educational channels. I could easily see a scenario where some very poorly done climate study is talked about on Youtube and it becomes demonetized simple because the algorithm believed it was 'climate change denial ism'.

Sure it is Youtube's right to do whatever they want and we are just 'lucky' that Youtube isn't controlled by anti-vax, climate change truthers, etc.

That's a lot of confidence to have in a very broken system given the replication crisis, ineffective peer review process, excessive and pervasive paywalls, and general high barrier to entry.

Lots of alternative scientific journals exist. Climate change denial is, in fact, well financed. There's nothing about a youtube ban that prevents alternative scientific research, even into things I'd considered absurd and despicable.

They're not even banning the content, they're just not showing ads on it.

YouTube only makes money if ads are shown on the video. YouTube also has an algorithm that chooses what gets promoted and recommended. There is absolutely no way that YouTube does not take into account whether a video is monetized when choosing recommendations. Ie this will most certainly limit the visibility of these kinds of videos.

It seems like the goalposts are moving in the conversation. People are acting like it's banned above, and then you're saying it hypothetically will be less but still nonzero proactive algorithmic promotion of the content, right?

Promoting the content is the same thing as endorsing it.

They recently removed videos against Covid vaccines.

Those videos lead to deaths - so that's completely reasonable. America has pretty much plateaued in terms of vaccination rates and that is prolonging a disaster.

If we're going to ban instructional bomb construction videos then I think anti-vax stuff is perfectly acceptable as well. I really don't understand where this miscomprehension that you should be able to say anything you want on private platforms comes from - there have always limits even on public speech, and private platforms have traditionally refused to print or publish items that go too strongly against their corporate beliefs. This even extends into print media and editorial boards.

> Those videos lead to deaths

Smoking and Drinking also directly cause deaths, yet as a society we are fine with taking such levels of risks and let people in videos show that they are smoking and drinking too. And don't get me started on opoids prescriptions which kill way more people that COVID all things considered (in years of life cost) and for which nobody seems to lift any finger to stop the carnage.

Which is why it's wrong on so many levels to censor stuff, because orgs that do that have no clue and no principles and just follow a certain political agenda instead of any rational motive.

How could video lead to death? I though it works only in horror films.

The US is currently 64% vaccinated even though the vaccine has been available there the longest - this is well behind most other western countries.

It is not answer for my question.

Every video leads to death. You waste 10 minutes of your limited time. You are 10 minutes closer to death after watching the video.

> Every video leads to death.

your comment has led to death too, by that kind of logic?

Ok, that is valid answer. Should we ban entire YouTube then?

Exactly, lol! It's a net detriment to mankind.

Well, "crate challenge" videos demonstably lead to deaths as well.

America prides itself on being the land of personal responsibility - I think the crate challenge stuff is quite dangerous and folks need to stop being idiots. But in the US people will cheer on Darwin Award candidates so that's sort of part of the culture now - doing something that harms other people is still a no-no though.

Not to mention science doesn't consider all opinions equal or worth publication in standard journals, etc.

Science is just more forgiving and less dogmatic than religion. etc.

Science certainly is. The "science" establishment in the USA... not so much. It is just as dogmatic as religion. Take the dogma of zoonotic origin of covid-19 in early 2020 for example. Where was the "less dogmatic" then?

> We're straying very far away from a nation that believes in actual science

One big issue is using the term ”believe”. It is not matter of belief, it is a matter of understanding, wrapping theorems and facts. We need to understand the science. We have already 10 000 gods, so let’s not make science equated to the religion and reduce its power with that.

I am so tired of people implying that they believe in science. Science is not a religion requiring belief.

Science is a way of postulating that something may be real given the a available evidence. A true scientist should be ready to change their understanding of “real” when presented with new evidence.

Belief or faith is trusting something is real without evidence and is the antithesis of science.

Define evidence, please.

Evidence is just data which is collected with the best available methods. With eyes, ears or some engineered equipment.

If perspective changes, we did not have enough data.

The knowledge comes when hard science is applied on this data, e.g math or logic.

We will never have enough data. Avalibe methods for collecting data are develop with time. So if you decide to believe science, you just agree with statement of actuall knowledge.

Temperature rising is science. Is it natural proces? Well that depends if you choose to believe or not in actual knowledge.

> It is not matter of belief, it is a matter of understanding, wrapping theorems and facts.

That's true of most of the "hard sciences" like physics and chemistry. Climatology, however, is unfortunately full of beliefs and incredibly lacking when it comes to theorems and facts. Part of that is just due to the inherent difficulty associated with making inferences about climate history using a relatively limited amount of data from modern, accurate instruments. Add to that some extremely biased incentives in the institutions and governments funding climate research, and you're no longer in the same ballpark as the other hard sciences.

I'm not saying it's all wrong or that the climate isn't changing (I think it is to some degree), but the one thing climatology has proven most convincingly over the years is that its prevailing predictions tend to be wrong – and not by an insignificant margin.

> The truth is there is no consensus so censoring half (or more) of the discussion is downright absurd.

I agree with your point, though even if there is consensus on a topic, we should still be able to have open discussion without censorship.

If you assume consensus is infallible, you'll be wrong sometimes. If dissenting voices are silenced, it's even worse: you'll be wrong, and not know that you're wrong.

In the cases where consensus is right, you're only adding fuel to the conspiracy theories when you censor opposing views.

In summary: freedom of speech - even wrong and unpopular speech - is essential to our continual pursuit of truth. To pretend that our world is somehow different today (as if misinformation or wrong ideas didn't exist before the internet) is just ignorance. How many times does history have to show us where the road of censorship leads?

Sad this is being downvoted. When you assume anyone or any consensus is infallible you have kings and endless appeals to the authority. The reason we have made unbelievable scientific progress is because we follow sone rules:

1) no one is an authority on the truth.

2) no one is infallible.

3) we can change our minds when new evidence occurs

This doesn’t mean everyone’s opinion is equal or that truth doesn’t exist. Credibility is important. Method is important. Reproducibility is important. Consensus is important.

It’s more difficult today because of the ease of mass communication. But in the end we are better off taking the long, difficult, and often infuriating road to finding the truth. The alternative is an inquisition and worse.

The truth will always rise to the top, eventually, this way even if we are wrong along the way.

If you don't back up claims with actual science then it's not part of the scientific method. Should flat-earthers be given equal authority too?

> Should flat-earthers be given equal authority too?

That's not the relevant question to this discussion (and also basically a strawman).

The question is, should being a "flat earther" be banned from online monopolies as misinformation? As objectively stupid as it might be (even though I don't think anyone actually believes it) I think it would be extreme overreach to start trying to shut down youtube videos positing the earth is flat

> start trying to shut down youtube videos

Not getting ad revenue is not having your video shut down. Set up patreon if you want income making "more CO2 is good, actually" videos (you probably should regardless of content).

>>>Set up patreon if you want income making "more CO2 is good, actually" videos (you probably should regardless of content).

People have been deplatformed from Patreon for unpopular opinions too.

https://heavy.com/news/2018/12/patreon-sargon-of-akkad-jorda...

>" Set up patreon if you want income making "more CO2 is good, actually" videos..."

What about when Patreon demonetizes the content?

> I think it would be extreme overreach to start trying to shut down youtube videos positing the earth is flat

I tend to agree. Demonetizing them and barring them from promoting any other products should be enough to discourage those crooks who don't believe themselves in flat Earth, but make videos, books and merchandise about it to cash on gullible users.

> That's not the relevant question to this discussion (and also basically a strawman).

It's not strawman, it's on the same level in the science spectrum as decisively not scientific at all. It's meant to (hopefully) help them understand how stupid of a suggestion they're proposing by offering an equally stupid example.

> The question is, should being a "flat earther" be banned from online monopolies as misinformation?

No, the question is should we reward them for their misinformation content and the answer is no.

Flat-earthers should be given as much room as they want to make fools of themselves. I find the notion of "it's on YouTube, therefore it's authoritative" intriguing.

i remember not long ago lancet scientists claimed that the lab leak was some kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Scientists can be corrupted too.

It turned out that 26 of those 27 scientists who signed the Lancet letter had undisclosed conflicts of interests due to connections with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9980015/26-Lancet-s...). Chief among them Peter Daszak, President of Ecohealth Alliance, whom we now know was involved in gain of function research with WIV that involved SARS-like viruses that could bind to the ACE2 receptor (https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/jvi.02582-15).

No one and no institution is an authority. Some people and institutions certainly have more credibility. But ultimately a core tenant of classical liberalism and the enlightenment is there are no authorities. Kings are authorities. Popes are authorities. We moved away from that for a reason.

Saying that, you’re right. If your science sucks then you should be ignored because there is little chance of finding a consensus of truth in it.

Does the mainstream media back up any of its claims that are supposedly scientific. "Trust the science", ask Galileo if he trusted the science of his time.

When did the United States as a nation uniformly believe in science?

"believe in science" What does this even _mean_?

It means think what someone else wants you to and don't question it.

Believe that the things that science says are true actually are true. It's pretty clear, no?

Is light a wave or a particle?

It's something that has wave-like and particle-like properties. What's your point?

That you have faith in the ability of the scientific method to ultimately reveal objective truths about the universe.

And, I guess, that you believe that there’s a scientific establishment that adheres to that method, and that the results it generates are disseminated faithfully to society at large.

I (mostly) agree with your definition, but the word 'ultimately' does a lot of work there. Many people who use 'believe in (the) science' are actually asserting that science already revealed the objective truths of the matter in question.

Why do you need to have faith ? The scientific method is all about proof.

At some point, you just have to believe, if you want to go much deeper, you get into epistemology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

That is precisely the point where Science ends. The notion that Science can and should provide a full account of the Universe in all its complex glory is a very strange idea, conveniently promoted by those holding the credential purse strings, aka the Science hierarchy.

Proof is changing over time.

You dont need to believe in anything. Science is not a dogma. if Science is correct it can be demonstrated.

Unlike heating up balloons filled with different gases - climate change isn't something that can be demonstrated easily. I don't disagree with your statement in general, but when it comes to climate change I'm offended by any contrarian who passively sits back in their chair and shouts "prove it" - you aren't owed that.

Why that person that you are offended by cannot be offended by your statement of active screaming (sorry, just use your terminology)?

We never did, but it can look as if it is moving further away from that goal

> There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything

Scientists agree that at low velocities, the force of an object equals the mass times the acceleration. This is just one point of agreement. There are others that I can't list here. You may be surprised at the amount of info that scientists agree upon.

It's not sufficient to cherry pick an example of agreement to refute the original comment. There are obviously many things scientists agree on, but there are also many complicated things scientists disagree on, especially when it comes down to the details. The key point is that the public tends to treat science and scientists as monolithic in their views. The truth is far different and there is an enormous amount of diversity in thought and lots of debate within the scientific community on many, many topics.

Not that I entirely disagree with you, but.... It is easy to fabricate consensus on objective issues when you wrap them in subjective language, such as "at low velocities".

Who is the objective authority on what constitutes "low"? You are. It is subject to your own interpretation, as is the consensus- a different point of view might cap "low" as being higher than what you do, and as such will see no such consensus, or see the consensus as blatantly wrong.

Virtually every statement in this post is wrong. There's plenty of consensus in scientific fields, that's the point of scientific work, building consensus by means of agreed upon methodology. The core of science isn't 'debate' whatever that means, but work within theoretic or empirical disciplines done by people trained in methods that have proven to produce results, i.e. 'scientists'. If there is disagreement, it needs to be justified and articulated in a way that meaningfully builds on the knowledge of the field in question. nobody in science pays attention to 'disagreement' from people who don't understand the body of knowledge they're disagreeing with.

Youtube commenters or video creators don't practice science, they commentate on science, and thus whatever banning happens there has exactly zero influence on the actual course of scientific work which is done by a small percentage of people educated enough to actually have anything to say of value and contribute to the actual body of knowledge that collectively is 'science'.

America as a nation is scientifically illiterate exactly because of the thing you're advocating, that every clown should have a voice simply because they can open their mouth and make noises.

> There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything... eggs are bad for you - no wait, eggs are good for you - no wait, only 1 egg a day - eat as many eggs as you can! Nobody agrees on eggs - how can we have agreement on far more important and challenging-to-study things like the climate?

Yes and if you ask Philip Morris, cigarettes are good for you and there is some evidence to the "benefits" of smoking by scientists. That doesn't mean smoking is healthy, nor is there a general consensus that it is good. The weighted evidence points to smoking being bad for you.

Now while I don't fully agree with the global warming fanatics, I am still sitting on the fence personally but leaning towards there being a problem, I don't see why a group of publishers and advertisers are not able to determine whether they want to be associated with the global warning deniers, given that there is such weighted evidence against them.

> Nobody agrees on eggs - how can we have agreement on far more important and challenging-to-study things like the climate?

On the other extreme, 2+2=4 is considered a hegemonic narrative:

> “Nope the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing,” (Brittany Marshall)

> “2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.” (James Lindsay)

So the main problem is trust. Some groups trust science and others think it's being used in bad faith, so they reject it completely.

>The truth is there is no consensus so censoring half (or more) of the discussion is downright absurd.

Demonetization != banning or censorship.

You can debate, you are just not getting ad revenue for this.

I’m okay with demonetization for things with less proof than the main alternative.

What I would be against is censorship: denying the voice.

Either is for the purpose of central control of discourse.

My view is no one has a right to “monetization” on someone else's platform.

Admittedly it is has a “chilling effect” but I’m more concerned that we should allow debate instead of being concerned we should be able to make money off of the debate.

I think you are right and debate is needed, but unfortunately on online platforms debate is really hard to keep civil and respectful.

On platforms like HN where the audience is somewhat selective and moderation is possible you can have a reasonable debate, however on platforms like YouTube where views are money it can be difficult for creators to not play to the algorithm and go for the click-bate title with the emotive thumbnail with content that will attract the most views.

I think YouTube, by removing the money making imperative is at least removing that driver from the equation whilst leaving the possibility of still posting controversial material and allowing debate.

> The core of science is debate.

The core of science is not debate. It is a cluster of related items such as falsifiability, empiricism, mathematical modeling, reproducibility etc. It is most certainly not debate. You are confusing politics with science, which in many cases is a very deliberate right wing stance.

> There is very little actual consensus in the scientific community about anything... eggs are bad for you

This is also false. Argument by analogy with nutrition science is a cop out, because it is unethical to run controlled experiments on human subjects without appropriate consent. However, nutrition is important for society and we make do with weaker correlational studies on biased samples which can evolve or get overturned in the future.

Climate modeling is very unlike nutritional or social science and can by modeled consistently.

Climate can be modeled consistently ? You must have missed the hundreds of models that predicted nothing and that we conveniently hide from view to cherry pick the ones that worked. Completely ridiculous statement.

Can you link to 5 of these peer reviewed published models that predict nothing?

While I agree with you in terms of true unknowns such as dark matter/energy (science does need more diversity of ideas), climate change science is comprehensive and conclusive.

Any other ideas are absurd: we know the human contribution to climate change cause, have measured the anticipated effect, and found irrefutable causality.

Disputing human climate change is like disputing the surface temperature of the sun. These are measured facts, not theories.

What’s conclusive is that more greenhouse gases means higher temperatures.

What’s not conclusive is the doomsaying and specific claims about the future and present. A great example of this is California’s governor blaming forest fires on climate change, and another one is the signs predicting certain glaciers would melt.

That's fantastic sharpshooting. One instance of assumption (that wildfires are caused by climate change) doesn't refute the human impact on climate change.

In addition, science has not yet made a conclusion on the forest fires (the governor may well be proven right), and the Siberian feedback loop is a wildfire and was caused by climate change.

The governor ignorantly commented on an unknown. Deniers deny known facts. There is a huge difference.

> In addition, science has not yet made a conclusion on the forest fires (the governor may well be proven right),

That is impossible. Climate's a chaotic system, you can't back-predict the timing of droughts. And we already know that with or without human greenhouse gases, California has droughts. There is not some alternate history where California’s forest management practices wouldn't let these kinds of fires happen.

I am completely exhausted by these large private monopolies becoming arbiters of speech. They have too much power and play too big a role in controlling our politics. Democracy isn't just the act of voting - it also involves everything that comes before it, and if you have massive platforms that bias their audiences through algorithmic/policy interference, it ultimately amounts to interference in our democracy. In a world where most of society's speech takes place on these platforms, we need to treat them for the common carriers they are, as UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh put it (https://shapingopinion.com/is-big-tech-a-common-carrier/), and regulate them.

To get more specific, this decision is going to result in Google drawing arbitrary, indefensible lines based on the perspectives their employees and leaders deem allowable. For instance, can a content producer monetize their perspective that the Pacific Northwest heatwave from June was not primarily caused by climate change? There were numerous headlines claiming that this heatwave was "virtually impossible" without climate change, quoting a paper that was not peer-reviewed. But the paper itself admitted that a record breaking heatwave would have taken place even without climate change, and this point was made by others such as Atmospheric Sciences Professor Cliff Mass at the University of Washington (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...).

So whose opinion is allowed in that situation? Who gets monetization that biases the world towards that perspective and who gets drowned out? Who gets a fact check or context label that casts doubt on their content and who doesn't? Apparently, the world we've accepted, is one where a small number of Silicon Valley progressive elites decide all of that for the whole world.

A while back a representative of one of the major US political parties said that "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." - when the government is constantly defunded more power is handed to private corporations. Somebody has the authority at the end of the day - you can't have a vacuum of authority - since the government has been restricted from actually being responsible for reasonable platform creation we've ended up in this bad timeline where mega-corps are the arbiters of speech instead.

> when the government is constantly defunded more power is handed to private corporations.

Defunded?

Please correct me I'm wrong, but I think that the overall Federal Budget has risen dramatically in this time period.

You're correct - but that funding is being more concentrated in certain segments of the government and national programs like what could host video sharing have thus been impossible to conceive of.

Also - the overall budget is a terrible thing to go by since wars cost a boatload of money.

> national programs like what could host video sharing have thus been impossible to conceive of

You're talking about desiring a government run video host? In theory, it's an interesting concept. But what happens when somebody starts posting objectionable, but still legal, content and one group or another starts screaming about blocking it? Seems like a slippery slope towards government censorship.

> Also - the overall budget is a terrible thing to go by since wars cost a boatload of money.

Please fact-check me on this, but I believe that wars are handled by separate spending bills.

> Seems like a slippery slope towards government censorship.

Luckily when it’s done by the government, that’s actually unconstitutional and you have a recourse. When it’s done by a private company, you have none.

Yea - as mentioned by the sibling comment if a government platform tried to censor you then your first amendment rights actually are being impinged (unlike how it is with a private company which owes you no right to expression). There would be some leeway for the government to censor content that was outright dangerous but honestly a federal judge would probably refuse to hold up any bans on flat earther or climate change denial content. While both of those topics are mildly harmful to society they likely wouldn't be immediate enough for a judge.

If you want free and open communication you want the government to have a (visible!) hand in it.

"Google said it's making these changes in response to frustration from advertisers and content creators about their messages appearing alongside climate denialism."

Then why not give advertisers the option to avoid putting their ads next to climate denialism, as opposed to demonetizing such videos entirely?

so looks like now advertisers vote what is science ;)

Advertisers pretty much decide what get monetised on YouTube if you think about it - the money YouTube gives out is advertiser money after all.

If that is true then why don't you or someone start a video sharing site for such advertisers who want to advertise next to such content?

2 seconds after starting said site thousands of sock puppet accounts on Twitter declare it a racist website, payment networks cut you off and the creators are doxxed and slandered all over social media and the news

What if climate denialists want their ads next to these videos? Who is getting prioritized?

The people with the money. Obviously.

Of course. It seems that I missread and this was all about advertisers, not about content creators.

Maybe because no advertisers have requested that ability.

It'd be interesting to see Google decide to charge a premium for ads on climate denial videos - pass on no more than the normal share... and put the extra earnings towards fighting climate change. Essentially: a climate change denial tax.

I distinctly remember advertisers saying they would put their ads on demonetised content featuring guns after they banned ads from such so it’s not impossible that some advertisers would be okay with their ads on some controversial content.

How could they have, this is a brand new change. I doubt they asked all advertisers there opinion. The assumption that all advertisers are in agreement on this topic is almost guaranteed to be wrong.

That seems doubtful.

I really get a bad feeling from having Google making these blanket policies considering how they've bungled up lesser moderation attempts in the past. Maybe this is a sign for Google to break up the YouTube video service into a federation of platforms rather than just a one-size fits all approach. I know that sounds impossible and maybe it is from a brand recognition point of view but I think forcing all their content streams into one platform has been causing them more problems than it solves. They can still use the same advertising network and associated API but they really don't need to push everything through one website.

I'm fascinated how private companies just casually decide on what truth is and what is not.

They don’t need to decide what is truth, they just need to decide what ideas they’ll pay people to spread. Probably something they should have thought about years ago, but better late than never.

So does this apply in this case as well: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-... ?

It seems to me the last recourse of any weak science and its zealots is to stifle conversation and rigorous debate.

The winner here will be Patreon.

Odd, I would think a lot of companies would target this Demographic. If I’m selling knives, trucks, atvs, boats, hunting and fishing supplies, farm equipment these are my people. It would seem like a great Demographic to for advertisers. I don’t understand why they would censor it.

Thanks, Google!

A supra-legal, unelected, international body to outsource my censorship to is what I always wanted!

Those steps of regulation of opinions is silly and eventually eat itself.

Problem is that with big tech centralisation and data surveillance we are vanurable to ideology in global scale more then ever in history. Whole covid agenda is proof of it.

Understandable. Debate is nice and all, but self-defense is justifiable.

Alternative headline: Google makes climate denial content on YouTube much more appealing.

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