White House shifts from “American Jobs Plan” to “Build Back Better” in online infrastructure push
Biggest climate groups also ditching AJP rhetoric on Facebook, but have found most success using neither
In 2021, the president’s Facebook feed isn’t just an extension of his bully pulpit - it can also signal to interested parties how the administration wants to communicate its message. In pushing for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, we found that Biden’s pages have significantly increased their usage of “Build Back Better” in recent weeks while practically eliminating their usage of “American Jobs Plan.” We also noticed that their usage of rhetoric around climate change has also increased.
We also found that climate action is a key element to their Build Back Better messaging. Of the president’s 48 posts in July featuring “Build Back Better,” 10 used climate-related terms to push for the infrastructure package, and all three of the most-engaged of these posts frame climate action in terms of economic mobility. However, we’d also like to note that a lot of the engagements on these are not positive. For example, Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s climate policy explainer video got 58,352 interactions, but 32,380 of those were Angry and Haha reactions.
The administration’s shift from selling the infrastructure package as the American Jobs Plan to the Build Back Better Agenda has been rather quick, but the biggest climate groups - including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sunrise Movement, and others - have mostly followed suit. We looked at posts from the nine biggest climate groups and found that they’ve dramatically reduced their usage of “American Jobs Plan” in their Facebook feeds, but they have yet to use “Build Back Better” at quite the same clip.
However, regardless of whichever term these groups use to define the administration’s infrastructure proposal, we found that their posts that use either do not perform well on Facebook. Over the past three months, the top post from these groups mentioning either term came from the Sierra Club, and it only got 932 reactions. It would appear that these groups have gotten modestly better engagement on posts that talk about infrastructure without putting them in the White House’s terms.
Here are the top three Facebook posts from nine major climate and conservation groups that mention infrastructure, Build Back Better, or the American Jobs Plan - but note that none of them mention the latter two.