Last week on social media, stories and posts about climate change and clean energy got significantly fewer engagements on Facebook than the previous week. It appears that the decline in engagement may be due to the fact that there were fewer viral stories; during the week of August 15th, stories about historic rainfall in Greenland and a fed up teacher in Utah railing against climate deniers to her students each got over 100k Facebook interactions. Last week, however, the most-engaged story, from Smithsonian Magazine, about the climatological benefits of reforesting, got just 45.4k interactions.
The most-engaged Facebook posts about climate change and energy last week came from prominent left-wing influencers like Robert Reich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and The Democratic Coalition who both regularly use Facebook to push for climate action and assert it as a central focus of the Democratic agenda.
We saw a similar trend on both Instagram and Twitter. The most-engaged posts on those platforms came from left-wing and media accounts with huge followings - like Sanders, Molly Jong Fast, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Brian Schatz, and Alex Padilla - either pushing for climate action as a Democratic priority or reporting on the immediate impacts of climate change. The most engaged Instagram post actually came from Katy Perry, who also used her platform to urge their followers to vote no in the upcoming recall election, with climate action as a central stake. Also, an explainer from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the true costs of fossil fuels, shared by NowThis, got 40k interactions and over 650k views.
Take a look at the most-engaged climate posts on Instagram last week:
And here are some of the top tweets mentioning climate change, clean energy, and other related terms: