Truth be Dammed: Climate Disinformation on YouTube and TikTok
With Maldita.es: dis/misinformation videos about Spain's Valencia (DANA) floods were amplified on both platforms and remained online a year later; YouTube lacks a dedicated policy and TikTok fails to enforce its own.
Executive summary
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AI Forensics, working with Fundación Maldita.es, examined videos posted in the month following the 2024 Valencia floods (DANA) on YouTube and TikTok, using Maldita's keyword lists to build two sub-samples: content debunked by fact-checkers and the 1,000 most-viewed dis/misinformation videos, collected via API and scraping methods.
The climate-related dis/misinformation reached at least 13 million views on YouTube and 8.3 million on TikTok, with per-video averages (21,250 on YouTube, 32,394 on TikTok) exceeding typical platform engagement — misinformation videos on YouTube drew 48% more likes and 123% more comments than baseline content, while TikTok misinformation saw 85% higher sharing rates. A year after posting, fewer than one in four flagged YouTube videos carried a warning label, and TikTok videos denying climate change remained unlabelled.
The report concludes that both platforms algorithmically amplify false climate narratives while under-enforcing their own moderation policies — YouTube lacking a dedicated policy for this content and TikTok failing to apply the policies it does have — and calls for greater researcher access to platform data to study these amplification dynamics.
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