Bezos' space flight received more engagement in one day than climate change did in the past week
On FB + Instagram, Amazon founder’s stunt got nearly ⅔ the engagement that climate did
The world’s richest man threw himself and three other passengers to the edge of space yesterday, and the stunt drew a lot of eyeballs. The national news media contributed to this; Media Matters writer Evlondo Cooper III found that they spent 212 minutes covering Jeff Bezos’ trip, coming close to the 267 minutes they spent covering the climate crisis during all of 2020.
We found that a similar trend played out on Facebook and Instagram in just the past week. On July 20, the day Bezos left and returned to Earth, public Facebook posts about him got nearly 3 million interactions, while from July 13 - 20, posts about climate only got around 2.7 million interactions.
Interaction totals are approximate.
Interestingly, the most-engaged post about climate change in the week leading up to Bezos’ flight does connect the stunt to climate change, but it came from none other than Dinesh D’Souza. He implied that climate advocates are okay with “billionaires using oceans of fuel to shoot themselves into space for kicks,” and was rewarded with over 100k likes and shares for saying so.
On Instagram, posts about climate change from July 13 - 20 got about 30% more engagement than Bezos’ near-space flight did on July 20. This could be for a few reasons, but we suspect the discrepancy is linked to Instagram’s visual focus. Recent imagery of global warming-enhanced weather events and their consequences are may be more compelling than some bozo billionaire in a gallon hat taking a phallic rocket to where man has gone before.
That said, one of the top posts about climate on Instagram that week came from Greenpeace, which - like many, many other progressive pages - pointed to the extravagant stunts by Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk as a stellar justification for a wealth tax.