Cook-ing Up Censorship
Digging through the Center for Countering Digital Hate's latest garbage to find what smells.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. - John Stuart Mill
When Elon Musk throttled Substack content creators four months after our launch last April, we gave up attempting to build a Twitter following. We maintained our account predominately to scout for stories that might interest our readers.
In late January, the X algorithm fed us a 1:00 video short by Hollywood actor and well-known environmental/climate activist Mark Ruffalo. In the clip, he introduces a new report released by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) titled The New Climate Denial - How Social Media Platforms and Contents Producers Profit by Spreading New Forms of Climate Denial. We learn from Ruffalo that “Big Oil has a new playbook. They’re going after the solutions we need to transition to a safer future like renewable energy and electric vehicles and they’re waging personal attacks against accomplished scientists. How do we know this? The Center for Countering Digital Hate has analyzed thousands of hours of climate denying talking points on YouTube.”
We perused the report and decided it would make an interesting story for our readers. But we expected it would fly below the radar of most content creators, so we sketched a few notes for a future post and set it aside.
Earlier this month we woke to find Doomberg’s post Climate Newspeak in our inbox and realized our assumption that no one would notice the story turned out to be wrong! But any disappointment at having been scooped on a story we had set aside six weeks earlier was quickly forgotten upon reading Doomberg’s superb piece. It covered aspects of the story we would have completely missed, yet left plenty of room for insights we had contemplated. (Beautiful thing, this Substack ecosystem.)
The New Climate Denial purports to document a shift in the tactics used by “climate deniers”, from “Old Denial” to “New Denial”. Old denial is described as “claims that global warming is not happening and/or that human-generated greenhouse gases are not causing global warming”. New Denial is “the departure from rejection of anthropogenic climate change, to attacks on climate science and scientists, and rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions to climate change”. A visual with examples is provided:
In his “X” video post hawking the report, energy/climate/environmental/economic expert Ruffalo explains why “Big Oil” has shifted its tactics:
“Big Oil is doing this because they know we’re winning. They’re getting their asses handed to them.”
In December, U.S. oil production reached an all-time record of 13.3 million barrels/day (bpd). World oil production increased to ~102 million bpd in 2023, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects it to rise by 1.5 million bpd to a new high of 103.5 million bpd in 2024. U.S. natural gas production is also at record levels, accounting for ~25% of global supply.
It is difficult to see where Ruffalo and team are “winning” much less that “Big Oil” is “getting their asses handed to them” in the figures above. Is Ruffalo’s X post “misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation”? Is this a form of hate speech?! These rhetorical questions are a nice (and ironic) segue to the CCDH report itself.
Doomberg’s outstanding Substack post provides background on CCDH and its CEO Imran Ahmed, including its 2017 founding in the UK, gaining U.S. tax exempt status in 2021, and its reported revenue ($1,471,247) and the salary paid to Ahmed ($126,333) on its last IRS filings (2021). It identifies three additional, highly relevant aspects of this story.
First, it highlights portions of a lawsuit filed by Musk against CCDH in late 2023 for alleging that “Twitter fails to act on 99% of hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers, suggesting that the platform is allowing them to break its rules with impunity and is even algorithmically boosting their toxic tweets.” Doomberg insightfully notes what X’s complaint suggests about CCDH’s modus operandi and what their new report hopes to achieve (emphasis added):
“ - the complaint does make for interesting reading. We found this excerpt particularly relevant to understanding the tactics being used against YouTube:
“CCDH’s underhanded conduct is nothing new. It has a history of using similar tactics not for the goal of combating hate, but rather to censor a wide range of viewpoints on social media with which it disagrees. CCDH’s efforts often rely on obtaining and intentionally mischaracterizing data in ‘research’ reports it prepares to make it appear as if a few specific users (often media organizations and high-profile individuals) are overwhelming social media platforms with content that CCDH deems harmful. CCDH uses those reports to demand that platform providers kick the targeted users off of their platforms, thus silencing their viewpoints on broadly debated topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, reproductive healthcare, and climate change. In this manner, CCDH seeks to prevent public dialogue and the public’s access to free expression in favor of an ideological echo chamber that conforms to CCDH’s favored viewpoints.”
Second, Doomberg’s work uncovered a detailed investigation by Paul Thacker that appeared in Tablet last October. Thacker dug for more information about CCDH and Ahmed after X’s lawsuit:
“…Paul Thacker documented one theory of what is going on with CCDH. Here are a few interesting excerpts:
“Ahmed’s history is hard to track. The two groups he has run—Stop Funding Fake News and CCDH—seem to pop up out of nowhere, switch addresses, rarely disclose funders, omit naming all employees, and feature websites that change names or disappear from the internet…
One rumor that came up often in the dozen or so conversations I’ve had, with people who have observed Ahmed for years, is that he works for British intelligence. Along with other questions emailed to Ahmed a couple weeks back, Tablet asked him to address the allegation he is connected to British intelligence, but he did not respond to repeated requests for comment…”
As Thacker noted in a post on his Substack one week later titled Who Ghostwrites Reports for the Center for Countering Digital Hate?, CCDH never names it researchers:
I then dug through past reports and found the same: CCDH’s reports are written by ghosts, anonymous writers who the media then quote as expert “researchers” in news articles.”
Finally, and most importantly, Doomberg’s post succinctly captures the malevolent subterfuge of the CCDH report:
“What matters here is the intentional attempt to normalize the labeling of views held by those critical of energy policy decisions as “digital hate,” a phrase that conjures all manner of genuinely deplorable activity.”
Farther down the rabbit hole lies the “team of academics” who we suspect were the ghostwriters for the CCDH report, and their methods. One member has a long history fancying himself as the self-appointed arbiter of climate truth. Who are the members of that team, what do we know about the report’s methodology, and how do we explain it? Put on your chest waders. We have to walk through some deep and pungent stuff to see the troll under the bridge, reach high ground and see what’s actually going on here.
We begin with a brief but necessary detour to address use of the term “denier” and “denial” in relation to climate change. We concede the fact that a small portion of the population denies humans have any influence on earth’s climate – whether by greenhouse gas emissions or land use changes. At the same time, we know of no scientists with relevant expertise in the field that express legitimate scientific questions about climate change who “deny” humans have some impact on earth’s climate. Despite this, many of these scientists are routinely defamed with the “denier” label.
Those who smear others with the term “denier” do so with the intent of likening their opponents to Holocaust deniers in attempts to paint them as evil, marginalize them, and silence them. This is an inexcusable rape of the term. It defames the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust and millions of others who suffered through the Nazi atrocities and survived.
Objective scientists do not use the term “denier”. Activist scientists, climate activist water carriers like CCDH, and legacy media do. It is shameful.
The terms “denial” (“denialist/denialists”) and “denier” (“deniers”) appear 270 times in the 42-page body of the CCDH report (not counting end notes, cover, etc.). The terms appear 25 times on the first page of the Executive Summary alone. Res ipsa loquitur.
Ahmed notes in the report’s Introduction that it “centers on data analysis performed by an AI tool, CARDS, developed by academics Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook and Mirjam O. Nanko.” We suspect these were the report’s ghostwriters. Who are these “academics” and what is their training in the fields relevant to climate science?
Travis Coan is an Associate Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Exeter in the UK. Constantine Boussalis is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Mirjam O. Nanko is a PhD Student at University of Exeter in its Q-Step Center for Computational Social Science (under supervision of Travis Coan).
Some readers will recognize the name John Cook, and a few may be familiar with his story. Cook is presently a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne.
Cook is best known as the 2007 founder of the Australian website “Skeptical Science.com” (SkS). The SkS “About” page describes its mission:
We have followed Cook and SkS from their beginning. He fancies himself as the arbiter of climate science “truth”. Though he no longer leads the site, it is fair to say that Cook helped popularize and normalize use of the term “denier” in the climate science debate. Despite zero advanced training in fields relevant to climate science, Cook remains a regular “source” for mainstream “fact checkers” like factcheck.org to even to this day.
Cook is also known as the lead author of a 2013 study that became a part of the “97% consensus” lore misreported and circulated by the world’s legacy media. Like the others commonly cited (e.g., Oreskes; Doran & Zimmerman), legacy media portrayed Cook’s study as if 97% of the world’s climate scientists agree that human-induced climate change is an existential crisis. None of these “studies” (and we use the term loosely) said any such thing.
Is Cook a trained climate scientist? Hardly. His CV lists an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Queensland, and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Western Australia.
In fact, among the CCDH report’s “academic team” - Cook, Boussalis, Coan and Nanko – there is not one trained climate scientist. Instead, we have a group of social scientist activists with a clear interest in silencing all opposition to the mainstream climate narrative.
As Substack author Roger Pielke, Jr. documents in this 2020 Forbes article, Cook has used SkS for no shortage of malevolence. With the endorsement of climate scientists like Michael Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf, SkS hosts a blacklist of “climate misinformers” that have ruined academic careers. Hacked internal SkS team discussions around 2010-2012 expose collaboration with left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) to improperly obtain advance Congressional testimony of several U.S. scientists in order to help Democrats impeach the testimony of those scientists. It is instructive to note that the Chairman/CEO of CAP during this period was long-time Democrat operative John Podesta, who recently replaced John Kerry as the Biden administration’s top climate official. The hacked forum discussions also divulge efforts to lobby or influence U.S. elected officials by the foreign-based SkS.
In terms of methodology, color us skeptical that any AI tool given a name that includes “..climate change denial” and associated with Cook can tell us anything useful. However, we can clearly see the political utility of such a tool.
For the new CCDH report, researchers gathered text transcripts from over 12,000 climate-related YouTube videos posted over five plus years. The videos were selected from 96 YouTube channels “that are known to have published climate denialist content” (from an earlier CCDH study listing these same four authors as sources), including individual “pundits”, media companies and think tanks. Then they let their CARDS AI tool do its thing.
The CCDH report claims YouTube is making up to $13.4 million in ad revenue annually from “denialist videos”, a figure estimated using Social Blade view/ad pricing value data. It states that “the 96 channels studied by this report received 3.4 billion (3,356,433,249) views on their content in the year between 18 December 2022 and 18 December 2023.” A small group of the channels listed likely receive the overwhelming majority of those alleged 3.4 billion annual views. And most of those views have nothing to do with climate change.
For example, Prager University’s videos receive ~1 billion views annually. Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel has more than double the subscribers as PragerU’s and surely has hundreds of millions of views, or more, annually. While only a tiny fraction of PragerU’s videos or Jordan Peterson’s podcasts deal explicitly with the topic of “climate change”, the CCDH report extrapolates YouTube ad revenue from all views to these sites. The thought occurred to us to wonder: how does that $13.4 million figure compare to the ad revenues YouTube receives from channels promoting Cook and SkS-approved climate science videos?
The CCDH report concludes with three recommendations:
1. Google must update its policy to ban “New Denial” from YouTube.
2. Social media platforms must demonetize and de-amplify “climate denial” content.
3. Climate advocates should use the report as a call to action against “New Denial”.
It is instructive to note that John Cook and CCDH both attempted to use similar tactics to silence “hate speech” and “misinformation” in reaction to legitimate scientific questions about Covid-19(84). In each case, neither have any relevant scientific expertise, both defend government scientific bodies as the only arbiters of truth, and both attempt to use the power of either social media or Administrative Statism™ (or both) to silence policy opponents.
What is really going on here? A political operative running a shadowy international non-profit under the guise of “hate speech” and “misinformation” has combined with the world’s self-appointed climate science police - a group with virtually no relevant scientific expertise - to attempt to pressure Google/YouTube and digital media concerns to silence opposing political views.
Why are CCDH and John Cook doing this? Channeling Ruffalo (and swapping climate activists for “Big Oil”), “they are doing this because they know we’re winning. They’re getting their asses handed to them.”
And no “deniers” or “fossil fuel lies” were even required. In the end, physics and economics would always have the final say.
We close with a creepy and disturbing analogy. Remember this arbiter of truth?
Allowing CCDH and Cook to be the world’s arbiters of climate truth is as absurd and dangerous as allowing Nina Jankowicz (aka Scary Poppins) to be the arbiter of disinformation/misinformation/malinformation for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s proposed “Disinformation Governance Board” (albeit not as creepy).
Those confident in the strength of their positions do not attempt to silence their opponents. Instead, they welcome all critics. In science, any attempt to silence skepticism is an attempt to remove a central tenet of the scientific method. Keep that in mind the next time you hear screams of “hate speech”, or “misinformation, disinformation, malinformation” involving any complex scientific issue.
Like this post or be sent to a deserted island with John Cook and Nina Jankowicz.
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Excellent column! I was studying the Old Denier/New Denier chart to see where I might fit in. I suppose I'm in the camp of: Not only do I not deny climate change, but I wholly endorse climate change. I'm willing to do whatever I can to help stave off the next cooling phase and ice advance.
Butter is bad for you, margarine is good for you .... butter is good for you, margarine is bad for you Why would I question a scientist?