Gaming Google on climate change: Oil firms use search ads to greenwash, says study
Google is selling oil firms valuable digital real estate that they use to downplay their role in climate change, despite the search engine giant pledging it would stop taking money for ads that counter the scientific consensus on global warming, a new report shows.
Researchers with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.S. nonprofit group that studies disinformation online, examined more than 32,000 search ads on Google's U.S. site, paid for by major fossil fuel companies, targeting 61,000 different climate-related queries over the past two years.
It found that the firms were purchasing ads on Google's front page to display to users searching terms like "net zero" and "eco-friendly", filling the space with ads that twisted the facts on climate change or disassembled the companies' track records on planet-heating emissions and pollution.
Imran Ahmed, founder of the CCDH, said Google had become complicit in the "climate denial industry".
"Google is used by billions of people as the primary lens to find information — if you can buy the right to be at the top of the search result, you can distort the lens people use to see the world," he said.
In response, Google spokesperson Michael Aciman pointed to the company's stance against climate disinformation.
"Last year, we launched a new, industry-leading policy that explicitly prohibits ads promoting false claims about the existence and causes of climate change," he said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"When we find content that crosses the line from policy debate or a discussion of green initiatives to promoting outright climate change denial, we remove those ads."
Google has not made public how many such ads it has removed.
The study mainly focused on the
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