Google accused of profiting from climate change denial

Google's advertising business has been accused of financing and earning money from articles promoting climate change denial published on a far-right website.

Campaign group Global Witness conducted an investigation focused on online articles by The Epoch Times that challenged the existence of climate change and questioned its severity.

The group said Google placed advertisements alongside such articles which makes money for both Google and the website publisher.

"We estimate that The Epoch Times webpages generated close to $1.5m in combined revenue for Google and the website owners over the last 12 months," Global Witness said.

The group said it believes that helping The Epoch Times to monetise these articles is in breach of Google's own publisher policies that do not allow "unreliable and harmful claims" that "contradict authoritative scientific consensus on climate change."

The investigation looked at Google-supplied advertisements on articles that promoted climate denial running on The Epoch Times' Spanish, Brazilian and global English-language websites.

In one example, an advertisement for a betting firm operating in Ireland was running next to an article that included the claims that man-made global warming is a "hypothesis" and gave excessive weight to theories that contradict authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.

The articles investigated promoted claims including that there is substantial evidence casting doubt on man-made global warming, human CO2 emissions only make a small contribution to climate change, and climate science is based on faulty temperature data.

Global Witness said that the Epoch Times did not respond to a request for comment.

Google said that its climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.

"Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses our policy line, we stop showing ads on that page," a Google spokesperson said.

Of the pages shared with Google a part of the investigation, the company said that two of the three English-language articles were already demonetised several months ago. The third was demonetised following a review for the report.

Google said that the Spanish and Brazilian versions of the articles did not violate its policies, and that the English-language policy violations were due to content shared in the comment sections.

"When potentially violative content is brought to our attention, enforcement teams work quickly to review it," Google said.

"Our enforcement is not perfect and sometimes violative content can temporarily evade our detection. When content does violate our policies and is missed by our enforcement systems, we take action on it," the company added.