How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better
Last August, during the hottest summer in U.S. history, the Senate began debating the country’s most ambitious plan ever to fight the climate crisis: President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better bill.
The next day, Big Oil swung into action against it. The industry knew exactly who to target: the voters of Sen. Joe Manchin, the all-powerful Democrat who infamously refused to support Build Back Better, and this week, declared the plan “dead.”
America’s top oil industry group, the American Petroleum Institute, unleashed a Facebook ad campaign urging residents of Manchin’s state of West Virginia to call his office and “thank” him for being a “champion” of U.S. energy. In total, those ads were seen more times in West Virginia than there are registered voters in the state, according to an estimate based on Facebook data made by the climate-focused, London-based think tank InfluenceMap and shared with VICE News.
Big Oil has spent millions promoting fossil fuels on Facebook in recent years, but the American Petroleum Institute—which is backed by oil majors including ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP—has been particularly blunt about its goal of killing or rolling back key climate and energy provisions of Build Back Better. The campaign included ads with the contact phone numbers for 47 members of Congress and urged Facebook users to call legislators and tell them not to raise taxes on natural gas. According to InfluenceMap estimates, the group spent the most on ads naming Manchin, and those spots got more than twice as many views as any other politician in the campaign. [Continue reading…]