LONDON: YouTube is making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change because content creators are using new tactics that evade the social media platform’s policies to combat misinformation, according to a report published on Tuesday.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) used artificial intelligence to review transcripts from 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 of Alphabet Inc’s YouTube channels. The channels promoted content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change that human behavior is contributing to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, the report said.
CCDH, a nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, said its analysis found that climate denial content has shifted away from false claims that global warming is not happening or that it is not caused by greenhouse gases produced from burning fossil fuels. Videos espousing such claims are explicitly banned from generating ad revenue on YouTube, according to Google’s policy.
Instead, the report found that last year 70 percent of climate denial content on the channels analyzed focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, portraying global warming as harmless or beneficial, or casting climate science and the environmental movement as unreliable. That’s up from 35 percent five years earlier.
“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said on a call with reporters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening but there is no hope. There are no solutions.’“
YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analyzed, CCDH said. The group said the AI model was crafted to be able to distinguish between reasonable skepticism and false information.
In a statement, YouTube did not comment directly on the report but defended its policies.
“Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
CCDH called on YouTube to update its policy on climate denial content and said the analysis could assist the environmental movement to combat false claims about global warming more broadly.
YouTube making money off new breed of climate denial, monitoring group says
https://arab.news/nr3am
YouTube making money off new breed of climate denial, monitoring group says
- Content creators are accused of using new tactics to dodge YouTube’s misinformation policies
- YouTube makes up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analyzed
Grok faces more scrutiny over deepfakes as Irish regulator opens EU privacy investigation
- The regulator says Grok has created and shared sexualized images of real people, including children. Researchers say some examples appear to involve minors
- X also faces other probes in Europe over illegal content and user safety
LONDON: Elon Musk’s social media platform X faces a European Union privacy investigation after its Grok AI chatbot started spitting out nonconsensual deepfake images, Ireland’s data privacy regulator said Tuesday.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it notified X on Monday that it was opening the inquiry under the 27-nation EU’s strict data privacy regulations, adding to the scrutiny X is facing in Europe and other parts of the world over Grok’s behavior.
Grok sparked a global backlash last month after it started granting requests from X users to undress people with its AI image generation and editing capabilities, including putting females in transparent bikinis or revealing clothing. Researchers said some images appeared to include children. The company later introduced some restrictions on Grok, though authorities in Europe weren’t satisfied.
The Irish watchdog said its investigation focuses on the apparent creation and posting on X of “potentially harmful” nonconsensual intimate or sexualized images containing or involving personal data from Europeans, including children.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
Grok was built by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and is available through X, where its responses to user requests are publicly visible.
The watchdog said the investigation will seek to determine whether X complied with the EU data privacy rules known as GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation. Under the rules, the Irish regulator takes the lead on enforcing the bloc’s privacy rules because X’s European headquarters is in Dublin. Violations can result in hefty fines.
The regulator “has been engaging” with X since media reports started circulating weeks earlier about “the alleged ability of X users to prompt the @Grok account on X to generate sexualized images of real people, including children,” Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a press statement.
Spain’s government has ordered prosecutors to investigate X, Meta and TikTok for alleged crimes related to the creation and proliferation of AI-generated child sex abuse material on their platforms, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Tuesday.
“These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters,” Sánchez wrote on X.
Spain announced earlier this month that it was pursuing a ban on access to social media platforms for under-16s.
Earlier this month, French prosecutors raided X’s Paris offices and summoned Musk for questioning. Meanwhile, the data privacy and media regulators in Britain, which has left the EU, have opened their own investigations into X.
The platform is already facing a separate EU investigation from Brussels over whether it has been complying with the bloc’s digital rulebook for protecting social media users that requires platforms to curb the spread of illegal content such as child sexual abuse material.
