Last week's top climate posts: September 12 - 18
Biden and AOC biggest climate action advocates on Facebook, Instagram
Far and away the top post about climate change on both Facebook and Instagram last week were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s posts about her provocative TAX THE RICH Met Gala dress. She used the moment to call for increasing taxes on the super wealthy to finance public investments in “childcare, healthcare, and climate action for all,” earning over 157k interactions on Facebook and over 2.39 *million* on Instagram. A follow-up Instagram video from her about the theory behind the statement dress earned an additional 281.2k interactions.
Otherwise, one of the biggest voices for climate action on Facebook is none other than President Joe Biden, as fourofthetop 10 Facebook posts and threeof thetop 10 Instagram posts mentioning climate change and related keywords came from his pages, getting around 140k and 343k interactions in total on each platform Each post highlights either the grim consequences of inaction, the opportunities that climate action presents, or both:
Unfortunately, the right-wing online media machine is also maintaining its own bad-faith drumbeat. Late last week, Fox News livestreamed remarks on climate change from Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a virtual international conference between multiple heads of state and special envoys. The stream ended up being one of the most-engaged posts about climate change on Facebook last week, driven largely by hate clicks. Roughly 84 percent of likes on the post were Angry or Haha reactions, and many of the most-engaged comments on the post expressed severe skepticism and disdain of Biden’s focus on climate change.
Helping to fuel this skepticism among the right-wing propaganda audience last week was Rep. Dan Crenshaw, with an assist from his friends at The Daily Wire. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted - again - about how concurrent environmental disasters underline the need for urgent climate action, which ended up being one of the most-engaged tweets about climate change last week with over 82.5k likes and retweets.
However, Crenshaw responded with a bad-faith argument about Sanders’ position on nuclear energy and carbon capture, and The Daily Wire successfully spun up the exchange as a clickbait piece that got 29.3k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, making it the third-most engaged article about climate change last week.
And lastly, here are the top five tweets mentioning climate change and related terms from last week, which notably include tweets from Biden and Ocasio-Cortez quote-tweeting Biden: