Have we tried everything to tackle the climate crisis? At least one simple idea has hardly been explored: prioritizing climate content on social media.

The climate crisis is seriously aggravated by a lack of attention, including in the recent United States presidential election campaign. But algorithmic recommenders could help, as they are responsible for a significant proportion of how human attention online is allocated. Algorithmic recommenders are artificial intelligence systems that suggest content, such as news feeds, music or videos, to people based on their behaviour and preferences.

Take YouTube, where hundreds of millions of users watch billions of hours of content each day. That’s a huge amount of brain time. But how do these users select the handful of videos they watch, out of the billions of uploaded content online? Well, in 70 per cent of cases, they merely follow YouTube’s automated recommendations. This system determines a massive proportion of human attention.

Effectively leveraging this attention could help achieve vital advances in climate action across the political spectrum.

In a recent article published in Ethics and Information Technology, we argue that YouTube — the world’s

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