YouTube is accessed by 2 billion people every month, but don’t rely on it to bone up on important science issues like climate change.
Plugging certain climate change-related terms into YouTube’s search bar is as likely to yield videos peddling climate change denial or wacky conspiracy theories as it is accurate evidence-based material, a German researcher has found.
YouTube’s algorithms may be adept at picking the sort of things you want to watch, but they play no role in determining editorial accuracy.
Dr Joachim Allgaier, a senior researcher at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, analysed 200 videos posted to YouTube over the past decade that he found using one of 10 common climate-related terms.
While plugging in “climate” or “climate change” mainly returned videos from mainstream news shows or TED Talks that reflected the scientific consensus on climate change, things got interesting when he used terms like “geoengineering” and “climate modification”.
Those are genuine scientific terms used to describe emerging efforts to control climate change, ranging from massive tree-planting programmes to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the sun’s energy hitting the planet.
“In the case of these search terms, one mostly finds self-made and amateur videos of protagonists who believe in the so-called ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theory, which claims that sinister and evil forces spray the population with toxic substances from airplanes for various reasons, but also a range of videos from people who deny man-made climate change for various reasons,” writes Allgaier in his paper which was published last week in Frontiers in Communication.
Studies point to similar results on YouTube when it comes to topics such as the well-debunked link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
A search for “1080 poison” mainly reveals videos from anti-1080 activists. When you drill into a scientific topic, you’ll find they can get hijacked, usually by amateurs.
What’s the answer?
Sticking to official news sources on YouTube, such as the BBC or trusted channels like Veritasium or TED Talks is the best solution.
But given that NZ on Air research shows 74 per cent of 15 to 39 year-olds are watching online videos every day, mainly on You Tube, the online video platforms wield huge power to educate – and also to misinform.
Removing Isis beheading videos is easy. The bigger challenge YouTube now faces is stopping its platform from being hijacked by science deniers and conspiracy theorists.
Originally published in Stuff.co.nz.
Photo credit: The Blowup, Unsplash
PETER GRIFFIN 