Axios is reporting that Google and YouTube announced Thursday that they will prohibit “climate deniers” from monetizing their content through ads and creator payments. Apparently, climate deniers will still be allowed to post their content, they just can’t make any money from it.

Axios reports:

Google advertisers and publishers, as well as YouTube creators, will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” the company’s ads team said in a statement.

“This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”

“Well-established scientific consensus.” We’ve been assured the science is settled — but since when is “consensus” science? Google and YouTube say they’ll still allow ads on things like debates on climate policy; that’s big of them.

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

So you’re still free to post that climate change is a hoax, but they’ll try to disincentivize you from doing it since you won’t be able to monetize any of your content. It’s not censorship yet, but it certainly looks like the first step toward censorship.

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