By: Ashley Pocrnich
Widespread internet access like we enjoy today provides most of us the opportunity to share our voices freely, and while this ability can be used to spread knowledge of scientific breakthroughs and new discoveries, it can also be misused by corporations to further their own interests. In the article “Greenwashing on Facebook: How the World’s Biggest Polluters Use Social Media to Obfuscate on Climate Change” from Time magazine, we are asked to consider how companies can use large amounts of money to give the impression on social media that they align with the popular ideal of environmentalism, when in reality they might be actively harming the cause (Lewton & McCool, 2021). The article outlines the energy company ExxonMobil’s sponsored posts on Facebook claiming a pro-environment stance, in a massive campaign that the program Eco-Bot.Net states earned them over 100 million “impressions” on users in the US during 2021. Eco-Bot.Net, a “net art-research project,” was created to highlight the scale of corporate greenwashing on some of the most popular social media sites online, such as in this case (2021). When the mining company Teck Resources was under fire by environmental activists in Elk Valley, B.C., the article describes greenwashing attempts by the company, like one post saying “’[o]ur home, our responsibility. See how we’re committed to protecting water in the Elk Valley for generations to come,’ …which, combined, accounted for some 100,000 impressions [on Facebook]” (Lewton & McCool, 2021). A public outcry calling for the company to take accountability for the harm they have done to the land was brushed aside using this smokescreen strategy.
This misleading of the online public on matters of environmental safety, while mainly perpetrated by companies with profit to gain from it, is also carried out by governments, as described in the article “Challenging Petro-Nationalism: Another Canada Is Possible?” (Gunster et al., 2021). It argues that that oil companies as well as the federal and certain provincial governments in Canada have been using tactics of “petro-nationalism” to try gaining the support of the wider Canadian public, saying that pro-oil greenwashing on Facebook “explicitly position… the fossil fuel industry as providing benefits to all Canadians and the country as a whole” (Gunster et al., 2021, pp. 61).
I tend to think that a public attitude leaning towards pro-environmentalism is a ubiquitously good thing, but wherever public feelings go, corporate marketing attempts will follow. The deliberate misinformation campaigns by companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, the latter as outlined in the article “Delegitimizing the enemy: Framing, tactical innovation, and blunders in the battle for the Arctic,” work to craft sympathy even as they are causing environmental disasters (Hein & Chaundhri, 2018). I feel that the story of this article proves some of the points suggested in “Greenwashing on Facebook,” mainly that oil company CEOs and marketing departments will do anything at all to convince people on social media that they are on our side, even going so far as to lie under oath, as Geoffrey Supran suggests ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods did (Lewton & McCool, 2021).
While these articles make me wonder if there is no hope for a future where we can trust what we see from companies online, programs like Eco-Bot.Net and the work they are doing to bring light to the problem make me feel more optimistic. Since social media sites like Facebook can be easily exploited by groups with a lot of money to spend on advertisements, “with its juxtaposition of photos of your sister’s kids and heated discussions about current events, [it also] offers an ideal venue for communicating these ideas” (Lewton & McCool, 2021). People who are proficient with technology and create AI programs to sift through the advertisements, like Eco-Bot.Net, can work to protect the rest of the public from misinformation online and keep those spaces healthier. Especially with the rise of so much environmental activism done on social media, seeing the same sites employed this way and used to generate profit for multi-billion dollar corporations is sickening to me. The threat they pose to such a susceptible audience that frequents Facebook, and everyone else too, is ever-growing, as we know that the “highlighting of only a few dissenting views on climate change can undermine the perception of a scientific consensus and the need for expert guidance during policy development” (Lewandowsky et al., 2019, pp. 1446).
The use of advertising on social media has been scrutinized for some time, and a question I find myself asking is whether there is an ethical way to do it at all on a site like Facebook, that is mostly used for sharing personal moments? Since advertising has bent the truth for so long already, how is greenwashing on social media any different? And most importantly, how can we protect ourselves and others from climate lies on social media?
References
Eco-Bot.net. Eco-Bot.Net. (2021). Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://eco-bot.net/
Gunster, S., Fleet, D., & Neubauer, R. (2021). Challenging petro-nationalism: Another Canada is possible? Journal of Canadian Studies, 55(1), 57–87. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.2019-0033
Hein, J. E., & Chaudhri, V. (2018). Delegitimizing the enemy: Framing, tactical innovation, and blunders in the battle for the Arctic. Social Movement Studies, 18(2), 171–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1555750
Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Fay, N., & Gignac, G. E. (2019). Science by social media: Attitudes towards climate change are mediated by perceived social consensus. Memory & Cognition, 47(8), 1445–1456. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00948-y
Lewton, T., & McCool, A. (2021, November 3). Greenwashing on Facebook: How the World’s Biggest Polluters Use Social Media to Obfuscate on Climate Change. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/6113396/greenwashing-on-facebook/.
This assignment was written for COMM 3220: Social Media, New Technology, and Society in Spring 2022.