Right-wing rhetoric around COP26, Build Back Better dominates Facebook
Looking at last week's top climate posts: October 31 - November 6
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Franklin Graham (307.2k interactions), Leonardo DiCaprio (166.3k interactions), and Franklin Graham (147.7k interactions). FWIW, the next top posts about climate and related issues came from Franklin Graham (121.4k interactions), Ben Shapiro (119.7k interactions), and Ben Shapiro (104.9k interactions).
Interactions on articles about climate change, conservation, clean energy, and related articles peaked on November 2nd, after President Biden appeared to briefly fall asleep during one of the COP26 talks he attended. Online right-wing media seized on the “SLEEPY JOE” moment, driving at least 362k interactions on Facebook, and the third-most engaged Instagram post about climate last week was Fox News’ video of it, which got over 1.3 million views.
Outside of the big conference in Glasgow, the House of Representatives passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal drove a lot of engagement around climate-related content on social media, but much of it was pessimistic. Yahoo! News ran a Fox News story about Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better Act, a story that got 156.6k interactions, which was the most-engaged article about climate last week. Further, five of the top 10 most-engaged stories about the passage of the BID came from either the Daily Wire (their top story got 97k interactions across Facebook and Twitter) or Fox News (whose parroting of Rick Scott got 24.8k interactions).
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from President Joe Biden (570.6k interactions), Mark Ruffalo (83.7k interactions), and Fox News (80.7k interactions).
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week, all of which unsurprisingly reference either the COP26 conference or the final passage of the BID. We do, however, find it interesting that while BTS drove some highly engaged tweets about climate change in previous weeks, last week the top tweet was driven by BLACKPINK. 🇰🇷 Kpop stans don’t mess around!