Last week's top climate posts: September 26 - October 2
Right-wing online pundits continue to mock Greta Thunberg for clicks
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from UNICEF (82.2k interactions), Breitbart (51.1k interactions), and Breitbart (35.1k interactions):
Last week, in the absence of environmental disasters or organized climate action campaigns, there didn’t seem to be many overarching conversations about climate change on social media last week that were tied to a specific event. One incident we did notice, though, followed remarks from Greta Thunberg at a youth climate activism conference, in which she lambasted the U.K. and India for their lack of material climate action. An Instagram post from The Guardian about her speech was the second-most engaged post about climate change on the platform last week, and a Breitbart piece mocking Thunberg was one of the most-engaged Facebook posts and articles about climate last week. NPR and NowThis also made successful posts about Thunberg’s speech.
Another trend we noticed was one that seems quite common regardless of the greater news cycle, as last week several posts and stories about climate action developments got a significant amount of engagement. These include a story of the Danish repurposing wind turbine blades as bike shelters that got 92.7k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, and a VICE News Instagram post about new environmental protections in Australia got over 50k interactions. However, the second-most engaged story about climate last week - at 55.2k interactions - was an NPR report on the declared extinctions of more than 20 species.
Here were the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week:
A few of the most-engaged tweets came from accounts of Democratic lawmakers and climate activists, but many came from a man named Peter Imanuelsen. He claims to be a Swedish journalist even though he’s neither, and he claims to love nature and the environment even though he uses Twitter to mock climate action. One of his tweets from last week called activists “climate change fanatics” while another was a poor satire of climate regulation, but both tweets got tens of thousands of interactions.
Overall, here were the top 3 tweets mentioning climate or energy issues from the last week.