(LifeSiteNews) — Google has released strict new guidelines regarding content on climate change on its platforms, promising to ban advertisements and demonetize YouTube videos that challenge “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
In a statement released Thursday, Google published its new guidelines, “Updating our ads and monetization policies on climate change,” seeing fit to disincentivize all content that characterizes claims of man-made climate change as “a hoax or a scam,” in the process enforcing some of the most restrictive measures against dissenting from mainstream thought on climate change.
As of next month, any claims which deny that “long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change,” will be subject to removal or demonetization.
Google is currently the world’s largest digital ad company, bringing in a reported $147 billion of revenue from the sale and brokering of advertising space alone.
The firm justified its decision by citing the alleged concerns “in recent years” of advertising and publishing partners “who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change.”
Google claimed that “[a]dvertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content. And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.”
Videos and adverts which contravene Google’s determination of true climate science will still be published for the time being, albeit without being profitable for the creators. “We will also continue to allow ads and monetization on other climate-related topics, including public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more,” the search engine giant wrote.
But competing theories on the causes and effects of climate change continue to rage, with strong support emerging against the idea that climate change is necessarily harmful.
Former climate alarmist Michael Schellenberger, who throughout much of his career espoused the popular narrative that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity, has since disavowed his former position. He now argues that “humans are not causing a sixth mass extinction, the Amazon is not the lungs of the world, climate change is not making natural disasters worse.”
Additionally, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, often noted as a metric for the progress of global warming, is at its highest level in the last nine years, increasing by some 30 percent in the last year alone.
Climate modelling has also been called into question, with faulty systems overestimating the extent of planetary warming, according to research in Nature Climate Change.
Despite evidence contradicting claims of an imminent climate disaster, Google maintains a narrow view on climate science.
The company intends to evaluate offending content using a combination of computer programs and human moderation “to enforce this policy against violating publisher content, Google-served ads, and YouTube videos that are monetizing via YouTube’s Partner Program.”
According to the statement, the policy is the fruit of a consultation with “authoritative sources on the topic of climate science,” Google boasted, “including experts who have contributed to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.”
“As is the case for many of our policies, we’ll use a combination of automated tools and human review to enforce this policy against violating publisher content, Google-served ads, and YouTube videos that are monetizing via YouTube’s Partner Program. We’ll begin enforcing this policy next month.”
Google hopes that the guidelines strengthen the company’s “integrity” while adding to its efforts “to promote sustainability and confront climate change head-on.”
LifeSiteNews did not immediately receive a response from Google regarding its commitment to consensus on the topic of climate change and their certainty about the prevailing narrative on the subject.
In addition to restricting advertisers and video creators who challenge climate science, the company claimed to be working to “better protect” its users and publishers from “unreliable claims, such as fake medical cures or anti-vaccine advocacy.”
LifeSiteNews was subject to Google censorship in February of this year, when the technology giant banned LifeSite from its AdSense advertising program as well as its Discover and News surfaces, citing alleged “dangerous or derogatory content” the company declined to identify.
YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, had already removed LifeSite’s account several weeks prior, deleting every single video published on the channel.