Generation R

Image: Ganges River Delta. Image provided by the USGS EROS Data Center Satellite Systems Branch. Caption adapted from text provided by NASA’s Earth Observatory. Source: NASA/USGS Landsat 7; NASA Earth Observatory. From NASA Climate YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAClimate

An interview with Joachim Allgaier on his recently published study on how social media platforms such as YouTube have become hostile to climate science. When you search around climate change on YouTube the results are 50/50 climate science versus anti-science Chemtrails conspiracy theories. YouTube and Google Scholar have been strategically hijacked by groups posting anti-science content, while at the same time academia has neglected to use YouTube and recognise it as the vitally important channel for their scientific voices to be heard. The interview is a call for scientists to actively engage with the platform and for YouTube to reflect the values put forward by its CEO and Google co-founder Susan Wojcicki of an appreciation of the scholarly environment within Silicon Valley. These values could be actioned in YouTube’s AI to favor scientific factual content and by adopting Open Science practices of enhanced transparency across its platforms as anti-science Chemtrails content is also immediately found in search results on Google Scholar. Open has worked for Google’s support of its technology stack with open source, why not apply the same workings to its search indexing, dare it be said by applying a little open library science.