Google will from November block ads that contradict scientific consensus on the existence and causes of climate change, choking the flow of advertising dollars to pedlers of misinformation.
The global digital giant says a growing number of advertising and publisher partners have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change.
“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” says Google in a blog post.
“And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.”
Publishers of misinformation get an estimated $US2.6 billion in advertising revenue each year from programmatic advertisers, according to analysis by NewsGuard and Comscore.
This includes hundreds of millions in revenue supporting false health claims, anti-vaccine myths, election misinformation, partisan propaganda and other forms of false news.
Platforms are under increasing pressure to cleanup information about climate. Facebook last month announced measures to help its users engage with climate topics and ensure people have access to reliable information while reducing misinformation.
The new Google exclusion policy includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.
“When evaluating content against this 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,” says Google.
“We will also continue to allow ads and monetisation on other climate-related topics, including public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.”
Google says it consulted authoritative sources on the topic of climate science, including experts who have contributed to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.
Automated tools and human review will be used to enforce this policy against publisher content, Google-served ads, and YouTube videos that are monetising via YouTube’s Partner Program. We’ll begin enforcing this policy next month.
“This new policy not only will help us strengthen the integrity of our advertising ecosystem, but also it aligns strongly with the work we’ve done as a company over the past two decades to promote sustainability and confront climate change head-on,” says Google.
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