YouTube Does Not Actually Understand The Skeptic Position: It Put A Warning On My Climate Video Saying Exactly What I Said
I have made this point in the past, but very few folks on the warming-panic side of the climate debate actually are familiar with even the most basic outlines of what skeptics argue. The climate debate is one of the worst examples I can think of where partisans gain their only knowledge of what the other side is saying from slanted and ill-informed descriptions of the opponents by their own side. This is roughly like my informing myself of Hillary Clinton's political positions solely from listening to Rush Limbaugh.
YouTube has adopted a policy of putting information / warning labels on videos by climate skeptics. Here is a screen shot, the YouTube addition is in the beige box:
This is the only example I know of YouTube doing this -- for example, you can't find information labels on, say, 9/11 Truther videos reading "steel doesn't have to melt to fail" or on Bernie Sanders socialist videos saying "adopting Marxism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century." So I guess we climate skeptics are considered by Google to be the worst of the worst on the truth scale.
But the truly hilarious part is that I don't disagree with this statement one bit**. Neither does any other prominent skeptic I know of. In fact, I have queued up the video to the 19:30 mark and you can watch me say exactly this.
Clearly, Google does not actually know what climate skeptics say. In fact, much of the video (which despite being 2 years old is still my current position on the topic and a good introduction to the climate debate) is about this very topic -- how what skeptics actually say and what warmists say what we way are so different, and how that SNAFU's the climate debate. One of my most popular articles in Forbes was on the same topic.
Postscript: I am not a conspiracy theorist, and try not to assign arcane outcomes in chaotic systems to subterfuge. But I do find it odd that when I Google myself, in the fourth position is random critique of one of my climate articles. There have been much more intelligent critiques of me historically than this one, and this particular critique garnered far fewer reads and inbound links than the original article, which shows up nowhere in the search. I am not persuaded that Google is putting its thumb on the scale in favor of critiques of skeptics, but I could be.
**Though I might quibble with equating climate change and global warming. They are obviously related but certainly not equivalents.
