The online reach of #PeopleVsFossilFuels
How far did content around one of the biggest climate protests of the Biden presidency go?
Last week, hundreds of climate and Native activists marched on the White House to demand that the Biden administration take a more aggressive approach to climate action than it has been in recent months. These protestors leaned on social and earned media to get the word out about their activism, but we found that the online reach of their actions was limited.
We found that in the past month (Sep. 20 - Oct. 21), public Facebook posts mentioning #PeopleVsFossilFuels and related terms only got 59,125 interactions, according to data collected from NewsWhip. To put that into context, the most-engaged post about Build Back Better from the past month, from Breitbart, got 102.7k interactions. The top Facebook post about last week’s protests actually came from The Washington Post, which got 8.6k interactions.
Far and away the most-engaged piece of content we found about the protests came from Mark Ruffalo, one of the most high-profile climate activists. His one post about the movement on Indiginous People’s Day got 98.1k interactions, accounting for about 76 percent of all interactions among Instagram posts about the movement. The next-most-engaged Instagram post came from the Sunrise Movement, which got 4.1k interactions.
We were surprised to find that the reach of these protests also appeared limited on Twitter, where engagement on posts about dramatic confrontations can get very high very quickly. The most-engaged tweet about the protest - which shared a video of activists occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs building - came from the People vs. Fossil Fuels Twitter account, which only got 16.3k interactions. All told, tweets about the protests from the past week (Twitter only ever provides data on tweets from the past seven days) only got 67,713 interactions.
While the most-engaged Facebook post about these protests was a fairly written piece of earned media, we found that the most-engaged article about them actually came from right-wing outlet The Blaze, which unsurprisingly cast the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as violent, using the headline, “Climate change activists storm and take over Department of Interior building.” The article, which got 17.6k interactions across Facebook and Twitter since its publication on Oct. 15, appears to implicitly compare the protests to the January 6th insurrection. The comparison becomes especially apparent when the article closes with a statement from Trump-era Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke:
Where is the liberal outrage now against lawlessness and destruction of government property? Deafeningly silent of course. I never cared about cancel culture activist backlash, and I don't care now. The left must not hide behind identity politics and instead recognize this for what it is: A planned and organized effort to destroy government property and incite violence against federal employees and law enforcement officials.