Fight over Line 3 escalates as more celebs call to stop the project
Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Indigo Girls, and grassroots activists raise more awareness as a proponent’s FB ads get more hostile
Following news that the Biden Administration defended a decision by the Trump Administration to issue permits to Line 3 in Minnesota, grassroots and high-profile activists alike used social media to keep up public pressure. Activity Instagram in particular over the issue peaked at 174.8k public interactions on June 26th, exceeding the previous peak from the past month on June 6th, when there were 127.5k interactions.
The spike in Instagram activity last week can largely be attributed to Mark Ruffalo, who posted a Reel interview with Honor the Earth and The Solutions Project President Gloria Walton. His interview drew over 328k views and got an additional 105.7k interactions. Jane Fonda also drove significant online engagement around the issue once again when she expressed disgust at the Administration’s recent decision, driving an additional 134.3k interactions.
However, both Ruffalo and Fonda saw remarkably less engagement on Facebook for nearly identical posts - only getting about 10k and 3k interactions, respectively - indicating once again that the former platform is likely the better tool for engaging activists and concerned individuals over the project. Interestingly, though, the Indigo Girls also joined the fight to stop the project by performing near the site, and while they drove significantly less engagement, they did not see the same platform disparity as Fonda and Ruffalo, getting just over 2k interactions on posts about their concert on each platform.
Other significant drivers of public online engagement around #StopLine3 on Instagram include the Indiginous Peoples Movement, The Progressivists, and activist Shahid Buttar. We’d also like to note that while environmental activists and groups, including Honor the Earth, staged a sit-in at the White House earlier this week, their Instagram posts about the protest only drove a fraction of the engagement of the above pages’ posts about Line 3. The Indiginous Peoples Movement’s post (below) got over 21k interactions, while Honor the Earth’s most successful post got just over 800 interactions and about 2.3k views.
On the other side of the issue, Minnesotans for Line 3, the most vocal online proponent of the project, is getting much more intense with its Facebook ads. While they’ve been using their ads to deploy ad hominem attacks against the project’s protestors, criticizing in bad faith their use of fossil fuel planes and cars to get to Minnesota, they recently spent less than $100 on an ad that went after a young Native activist by name.
They also spent an additional $200 or so on a pair of ads attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar and promoting a recent Fox News story that’s in-line with their recent messaging. All of these ads targeted either older men or young adults in Minnesota and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.