YouTube Must Be Held Accountable for Prolonging the Climate Crisis 

On April 22, 2020, in celebration of Earth Day, UnKoch My Campus is joining forces across a wide coalition of youth environmental activists to demand accountability from YouTube. While Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color suffer from the impacts of environmental racism, YouTube continues to provide a platform for climate change denialists and accrue revenue from ads and clicks. We believe that YouTube’s motivation to collect profit from climate denial places people of color, the working class, and the LGBTQ community at risk. 

A January 2020 report by Avaaz found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm gives climate change denial videos free promotion and promotes misinformation to millions who wouldn’t have been exposed to it otherwise. YouTube is even incentivizing this climate misinformation content via its monetization program. Every time an ad is shown on a YouTube video, the advertiser pays a fee, of which 55% goes to the video creator and the other 45% to YouTube.

Not mentioned in the Avaaz report is the fact that 75% of the videos they featured are not only being funded by the Koch Network, but also feature Koch-funded people in them. The Koch network's political success has been dependent upon their winning a battle of ideas, and YouTube is helping facilitate such victories for fossil fuel interests.

YouTube’s promotion and monetization of climate misinformation should be taken just as seriously as the promotion and monetization of white supremacist ideology and hate speech. The impacts of ongoing environmental deregulation and leisurely, if not reluctant, action on climate change are disproportionately harming Black communities in the United States and communities of color in the Global South. 

YouTube must flag these denial videos as ‘misinformation’ and immediately remove them from their monetization program. YouTube’s promotion and monetization of climate misinformation directly contribute to the Koch network’s ongoing success in casting doubt on climate change and the ongoing harm climate inaction is causing communities of color.