Last week's top climate posts: October 10 - 16
The online conversation around climate change and clean energy took a global perspective last week thanks to Bloomberg Opinion and The Guardian
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Bloomberg Opinion (46.2k interactions), Reuters (44.3k), and Vanity Fair (28.4k interactions).
In a relatively rare turn of events, several of the top posts across Facebook and Twitter concerned news outside the United States, likely due to Americans’ unique interest in the British royal family and general antipathy toward Chinese economic dominance. The above statement from Prince William generated relatively high levels of engagement on both platforms for the outlets that reported on it, including Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and NowThis. Additionally, a Bloomberg post about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle participating in sustainable investing generated engagement, as did reported behind-the-scenes comments from Queen Elizabeth II about the upcoming COP26.
We suspect that the top two Facebook posts about climate change and clean energy did well because they generated a relatively high level of sinophobic hate-clicks, a trend that Bloomberg Opinion appeared content to ride to social media success. Two of the top three stories about climate change and clean energy came from them, with headlines reading: “China Only Has the Energy For One Crisis at a Time” (52.1k interactions) and “China’s Power Crisis Will Affect Industries Worldwide” (49.6k interactions).
We also noticed - and you may have as well - that the latest iteration of Superman generated a fair amount of controversy (read: engagement). An Instagram post from The Guardian about the iconic superhero’s new identity got 31.6k interactions, and a leftist tweet expressing disgust at the character’s portrayed peaceful activism was the most-engaged tweet about climate change last week.
A different story with global appeal from The Guardian that illustrated major cities drowning in risen sea levels also went relatively viral last week. The story itself got 70k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, making it the most-engaged article about climate change last week, and their Instagram post of the story got 83.9k interactions.
Overall, here were the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week:
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. Like the above two platforms, some of the most-engaged content came from accounts that are openly antagonistic toward Democrats’ current handling of climate policy. The most-engaged tweet from a Democrat last week came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which got 34.7k interactions.