Breitbart used Hawaii blizzard, changing polar bear habits to reinforce climate denial
Breitbart used Hawaii blizzard, changing polar bear habits to reinforce climate denial
Looking at last week's top climate posts: November 28th - December 4th
Breitbart used Hawaii blizzard, changing polar bear habits to reinforce climate denial
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Barack Obama (60.7k interactions), Breitbart (50.1k interactions), and professional car enthusiast David Freiburger (23.1k interactions), who appears to have started a good-faith discussion about the net sustainability of electric vehicles.
Last week seemed to be a banner week for Breitbart and its subversive climate-denying content. Not only did the second-most-engaged Facebook post about climate change come from Breitbart, but the propaganda site actually generated the most engagement on articles about climate change, generating 27.3k interactions, second only to Reuters, which generated 45.3k interactions on its articles related to climate change. Furthermore, the most-engaged article about climate last week also came from Breitbart, generating 15.8k interactions on its own.
While Breitbart used the blizzard in Hawaii to reinforce the narrative among climate skeptics that “the climate is always changing,” Occupy Democrats actually used the same story to provide evidence to its audience that “CLIMATE CHANGE IS OUT OF CONTROL!” However, Occupy was only about to generate 12.2k interactions compared to Breitbart’s 50.1k interactions.
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from Barack Obama (232.6k interactions), actress Kate Walsh (194.9k interactions), and Dan Crenshaw (66.5k interactions). We’d also like to note that Kamala Harris generated 60.6k interactions on a pair of posts touting the positive benefits of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. We also found that an article from UK-based Carbon Brief that stated the CO2 emissions have plateaued - a troubling development for those of us who desperately want to see them sharply decline - seems to have been interpreted by climate skeptics on Twitter to mean that climate science in general is bogus. Additionally, a right-wing podcaster claimed that “The manipulation of gas price is fully intended to scare us into driving electric cars,” getting 11k interactions on just that tweet.
