Fundación Maldita.es and the French organization Science Feedback, with support from the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, published a joint report “Inconsistencies in climate dis/misinformation moderation on YouTube and TikTok: A phased analysis on video-based platform enforcement of climate disinformation under the EU’s Digital Services Act”.
We jointly conducted a phased analysis on video-based platforms enforcement of climate mis/disinformation under the EU’s Digital Services Act. We reviewed 331 videos on TikTok and 894 on Youtube in Spanish and in French, retrieved through a keywords search of terms recurrent in Science Feedback’s and Fundación Maldita’s climate dis/misinformation work and AI-filtered to flag only those likely to violate platforms’ policies. After manually reviewing and fact-checking them, we reported 87 videos to TikTok and 82 to YouTube across both languages.
Key Findings:
YouTube does not enforce its policy of demonetising climate dis/misinformation: after we reported 82 videos to YouTube that contained climate misinformation in violation of the platform’s policy, the platform only demonetized less than 5% of those videos.
YouTube climate dis/misinformation moderation is completely opaque: even if certain videos were seemingly demonetised following our reports, neither Fundación Maldita.es nor Science Feedback received any response.
TikTok’s moderation of climate dis/misinformation is inconsistent and likely automated: of the 87 reported videos, TikTok restricted only 20%, focusing on climate-related conspiracy theories. A 0% rate of reversed decisions after appeal strongly indicates purely automated means.
Appealing to an ODS and a DSC showed very limited success: for every negative decision of YouTube and TikTok we filed a complaint, in Spain to a DSA Out-Of-Court Dispute-Settlement Body (ODS) and in France to the national Digital Services Coordinator (DSC). The ODS replied to just 10% of complaints in less than a month, while the DSC did not offer a reply.
Our recommendations include applying existing policies diligently and consistently, as DSA requires, but also updating them to provide clarity around more sophisticated "new denial" narratives that go beyond the traditional outright denialism. Also: more transparency and human review.
You can access the full report here and read about how to fix a system that appears not to be working here.