Online conversation around climate, clean energy quieted during Thanksgiving holiday
Looking at last week's top climate posts: November 21st - 27th
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Reuters (14k interactions), Reuters (13.2k interactions), and Business Insider (13.2k interactions).
Unsurprisingly, engagement on posts about climate change was low across the board last week, largely due to folks logging off around Thanksgiving. Even a post from President Joe Biden about the Build Back Better Act only got just over 12k interactions. We suspect that the general lack of engagement may be attributable to social media managers pushing less content last week anticipating lower levels of engagement, but we also found that there were also far fewer relevant articles for users to engage with in the first place. Last week just 13.6k articles mentioning climate change were published, versus 28.4k articles the previous week, according to NewsWhip.
However, we did find that the two most-engaged articles that mention climate change came from Breitbart and Newsmax, raking in 26.6k and 22.3k cumulative interactions respectively. Breitbart implicitly criticized President Biden as hypocritical and out-of-touch after he cited savings on gas by owners of electric vehicles - a talking point that right-wing media also successfully dug into after Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm made a similar comment in May. Newsmax, on the other hand, practically lauded Sen. Joe Manchin for his corrosive opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from The Washington Post (64k interactions), NowThis News (61.4k interactions), and Breitbart (47.2k interactions).
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. The top two tweets refer to a completely false story about Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but nonetheless feed the narrative that Democrats are lying about climate change to better themselves.