PragerU’s perennial quest against clean energy and climate action
The disinformation group deploys familiar tactics against climate action to huge audiences
Dennis Prager and his online media company, PragerU, have been polluting social media with their dishonest right-wing content for over a decade. Naturally, among the policy objectives they oppose is a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to renewable clean energy, especially now that a climate-minded Democrat is in the White House.
Since President Biden’s inauguration, PragerU has made at least 134 posts about clean energy and the environment on Facebook and Instagram, according to data from Crowdtangle, reaching nearly 6 million followers across both platforms just about every day with lib-owning content like this:
When it comes to Facebook in particular, their best-performing content on climate change often takes the form of essay-style posts from their climate “experts.” Take this one by Richard Lindzen, a professor emeritus at MIT, which takes over 600 words to make the misleading argument that the “climate is always changing.” According to Crowdtangle, it got 2.59 times more engagement than their average content.
However, when it comes to social media, their bread and butter are YouTube videos. Their channel covers a lot of ground, mostly focusing on “antifa”, racial justice, and communism, but their infrequent videos on clean energy are just as misleading as the rest of their content.
One video, from February of this year, tries to argue that rising electricity prices are due to an increased investment in clean energy. Another from late December of last year decries the sins of “Big Green,” arguing that it’s a more dangerous “Big” than the fossil fuel, tech, pharmaceutical, finance, or media industry.
They have nearly 3 million subscribers, and it’s no secret that YouTube’s algorithms funnel users to radicalizing content - from the above video, for example, viewers are suggested videos featuring Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other climate deniers - so it’s easy for us to see why PragerU’s explainer videos rack up millions of views. If nothing else, though, at least the comments can be good:
As far as digital ads go, they’ve invested a considerable amount of cash in Facebook and Instagram political ads: $842,119 since the political ad ban was lifted on March 6th. To put that into perspective, ExxonMobil has spent $1,138,024 on the platform in that same time frame. And while the Facebook Ad Library makes it extremely difficult to get any hard quantitative data on ads from a group on a given topic we can get a qualitative sense of their ads on climate and energy, of which there don’t seem to be many.
When it comes to clean energy, their most recent Facebook ads that we can find, from early April, use a familiar argument against solar and wind: the raw materials required for these energy sources are themselves unsustainable, so we should just stick with fossil fuels because they’re more efficient and reliable. They also deployed Tomi Lahren in late April decrying “the left's dishonest climate propaganda and hysteria” to get emails.
We estimate that PragerU spent about $16k on these two ad campaigns, which were mostly targeted at older Americans nationwide, but the ads featuring Lahren were mostly targeted at older men.