YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate "Misinformation" - Adds Fact Checking
YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation
The company is trying to combat scientific misinformation
on its platform. Wikipedia has been helping the streaming platform describe
topics like global warming, the MMR vaccine, and UFOs.
By Zahra Hirji BuzzFeed News Reporter August 7, 2018, at
9:36 p.m. ET
YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question
climate change, BuzzFeed News has confirmed, as a part of its ongoing effort to
combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.
On July 9, the company added a blurb of text underneath
some videos about climate change, which provided a scientifically accurate
explainer. The text comes from the Wikipedia entry for global warming and
states that "multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate
system is warming."
This new feature follows YouTube’s announcement in March
that it would place descriptions from Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica
next to videos on topics that spur conspiracy theories, such as the moon
landing and the Oklahoma City bombing. In doing the same for climate videos,
the company seems to be wading into more fraught and complex intellectual
territory.
"I’d guess that it will have some influence, at
least on those people who don’t know much about the subject," Anthony
Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told
BuzzFeed News by email. "Might be confusing to some people, but that’s
probably better than just accepting the denier video at face value."
YouTube has not disclosed the full list of topics it is targeting.
But a Wikipedia post to its administrators in mid-July offers some clues,
listing seven topics the company was helping clarify: global warming, Dulce
Base, Lilla Saltsjöbadsavtalet, the 1980 Camarate air crash, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, the Kecksburg UFO incident, and the MMR vaccine.
The two organizations appear to be working more closely since the launch of
YouTube’s policy, which Wikipedia did not know about in advance.
Google, which owns YouTube, has struggled to excise
misinformation from its platforms. In November 2017, it tried a feature that
fact-checked descriptions of newspapers and other items that appear in search
results but suspended it in January after some mistakes triggered complaints.
When the new Wikipedia blurb policy took effect in July,
YouTube did not publicly say that climate change was an impacted topic, and the
company did not notify users who had uploaded the affected videos.
The Heartland Institute, for example, a conservative
think tank that posts videos of its staff and others questioning climate
change, told BuzzFeed News that it noticed the change a few weeks ago and had
not been notified by YouTube. Spokesperson Jim Lakely declined to comment on
the policy or its impact. PragerU, a nonprofit online "university"
that made some of the other affected videos, says YouTube’s policy shows its
political bias.
"Despite claiming to be a public forum and a
platform open to all, YouTube is clearly a left-wing organization," Craig
Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, said by email. "This is just
another mistake in a long line of giant missteps that erodes America’s trust in
Big Tech, much like what has already happened with the mainstream news
media."
YouTuber Tony Heller, who also makes climate denial videos,
described the policy on Twitter as YouTube "putting propaganda at the
bottom of all climate videos." (He did not respond to a request for
comment.)
It’s not just misleading climate videos. The same climate
blurb was appended to dozens of videos explaining the evidence and impacts of
climate change.
"It was a surprise when we saw it show up on videos
that are not conspiracy videos, but climate science videos," Joe Hanson,
who produces multiple video series including Hot Mess and It’s Okay to Be
Smart, told BuzzFeed News.
Hanson polled his audience about YouTube’s fact-checking,
and the result was largely positive. "It is a probably a good thing,"
especially for videos with misleading science, Hanson said.
"I welcome this change," Katharine Hayhoe, a
climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told BuzzFeed News by email.
Climate science is not an opinion because scientists agree it’s happening based
on documented facts, she said. "I appreciate that YouTube is taking their
responsibility seriously to help people understand the difference." Hayhoe
had noticed the descriptions suddenly show up with her Global Weirding video
series on YouTube.
Climate scientist Michael Mann likened YouTube’s new
messaging to the warning label on a pack of cigarettes: "Warning — this
video may or may not be promoting actual facts about climate change."
YouTube says the goal of its policy is to give users easy
access to more context and information on topics prone to misinformation, such
as climate change. And in the coming months, more and more videos will be
getting these labels.
The company is using an algorithm, not people, to decide
which videos get the blurbs and which do not, a spokesperson said. The labels
are for now only visible to people in the US and are being rolled out
gradually. So two people can look at the same video and only one may see the
description.
YouTube plans to measure the effectiveness of these
panels by tracking how often users click on the climate description provided,
which links back to the original Wikipedia page. If the page gets updated, so
will the text under the videos.
And what if the Wikipedia page is edited to include
misinformation? The YouTube spokesperson noted that the text under the videos
does not refresh immediately, leaving a time lag between when a Wikipedia page
is edited and when the change shows up on YouTube. This could allow Wikipedia
editors to catch inaccuracies before they appear on YouTube — or lead to angry
YouTubers giving Wikipedia added headaches. (Wikipedia deferred questions on
this topic to YouTube.)
According to a BuzzFeed News review of dozens of videos,
the label shows up more consistently on videos with "global warming"
and "climate change" in the title than ones without.
On a series of misleading climate videos posted by the news
site RT, there is no note about climate change, but there is a Wikipedia
description about the publisher, saying: "RT is funded in whole or in part
by the Russian government."
Jason Reifler, a political science professor at the
University of Exeter, praised YouTube for starting to tackle the challenge of
misinformation but said he’s skeptical of how effective the climate change
description will be.
"They could have chosen wording that’s stronger and
gets more to what the real terms of debate are between the extremely
well-supported consensus scientific video versus the much, much smaller
proportion of skeptics," Reifler told BuzzFeed News.
"I’m doubtful this first step is going to do
much," he added. "But I hope it does!"
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