Last week's top climate posts: July 18 - 24
Right-wing pages work to undermine Civilian Climate Corps by making AOC its face
For starters, here are the top 3 performing posts across Facebook in the United States last week mentioning a variety of keywords, including climate change, global warming, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, civilian climate corps, and Green New Deal.
A White House post about the intersectionality of climate change and institutional racism was one of the most-engaged Facebook posts about climate. However, we think similar climate-skeptic sentiments are what propelled the engagement on Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s post and the White House’s post.
Our biggest clue is the reaction ratio of the White House post: it’s gotten 15,508 Haha reactions and only 6,205 Likes, indicating to us that most folks who’ve engaged with this post didn’t take the statement seriously. A quick look at the post’s top comments confirmed our suspicions:
Another of the top Facebook posts about climate change also came from the White House, but was met with similar derision from Facebook users against the Administration’s approach to the climate crisis. However, a similar post by President Joe Biden was met with a more amiable (or at least far less antagonistic) response.
Before we take a look at the top posts about climate on the major social media platforms, we’d like to make clear that we’ll be getting our data from Newswhip instead of Crowdtangle for the foreseeable future. As a result, we have access to new data; on top of knowing which posts mentioning climate change got the most engagement, we can also see, for example, which articles about climate change received the most engagement and traffic from social media posts.
Looking at the best-performing articles can give us an idea of what climate-related narratives had an impact in a given week. Last week, some of the top performing stories about climate on Facebook included the following:
Bloomberg: The Saudi Prince of Oil Prices Vows to Drill ‘Every Last Molecule’ (22.4k interactions)
Rumble/BonginoReport: AOC Says Climate Change Needs "Wartime Scale Mobilization" (20.3k interactions)
Axios: Next heat dome to build across Lower 48, aggravating drought, fires (17.6k interactions)
Audubon: The Audubon Mural Project Lands in the Pacific Northwest (13.6k interactions)
IDEAS.TED.COM: The jaw-droppingly high, out-of-this-world carbon footprint of space tourism (12k interactions)
We can also see where those article engagements are coming from. For example, the Rumble article got 17.8k interactions after Dan Bongino shared it, and the story got another 5.5k interactions after Sean Hannity and Donald Trump For President shared similar articles. It appears that Dan Bongino et al may be trying to reduce the chances of the Civilian Climate Corps becoming reality (or at least starving it of public support if it is passed) by associating it with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We’ve also reconsidered how to best look at who’s driving conversations about climate change across platforms. From previous weeks’ coverage, we can clearly see that pro-climate advocacy groups and big polluters like Exxon are not, for the most part, driving much organic engagement on the issue. For the past three months, we’ve seen climate groups (and polluters) average 2,000 or 3,000 interactions per post, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the engagement we see from pages like Occupy Democrats or Bernie Sanders. As you can probably guess, the biggest influencers driving online conversations on the issue seem to be mega-Facebook pages like those of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich on the Left, Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro on the Right, and mainstream media outlets.
With that in mind, he top 10 Facebook posts overall about climate change or related keywords last week came from the following pages:
Here are the top 10 posts about climate or related keywords on Instagram last week and the # of interactions each post received.
Moving forward, we’re also going to be regularly monitoring activity about climate change and related topics on Twitter. For better or worse, Twitter is where key influencers - including climate journalists, activists, and politicians - get their information and drive the conversation that often bleeds onto other social media platforms. So, here are the top 10 tweets that mentioned climate change last week.
In looking at top posts across platforms last week, especially as environmental catastrophes unfold around the world, we get an idea of which posts often gets the most engagement: on Twitter, incredulity and anger at the lack of climate action; on Instagram, news outlets’ posts about climate disasters do well; but climate deniers like Newsmax, Dan Bongino, and others continue to find the most success on Facebook.