A recent study reveals a strong connection between three fossil fuel-based industries — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — and their use of social media to deny climate change and delay climate action.
Energy, plastics and agrichemicals all rely on the same feedstock: fossil fuels. The biggest energy companies sell oil and gas predominantly; most plastic is a byproduct of natural gas; and nearly all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels.
Because of this reliance, these industries are all significant contributors to climate change. So researchers wanted to understand how frequently the groups interact with each other on social media and if they share similar messaging on climate change.
To do that, they downloaded and pored through more than 120,000 tweets posted by nine key players in energy, plastics and agrichemicals. They looked at Twitter posts from 2008 to 2023 (before the company was renamed X) from the two largest individual companies from each sector and their trade associations in the U.S.
The researchers then mapped out a “mentions network” between the nine groups.
They used five keywords — pipeline, sustainability/sustainable, EPA, economy, and water — and analyzed how often the groups communicated with each other based on those keywords and how often they used social media to muddy the waters on climate change.
The analysis showed that the companies heavily engage with each other: “[A]l nine of the accounts have mentioned or been mentioned by at least four other accounts in the group,” the researchers note.
Moreover, the organizations used social media to contribute to “discourses of climate delay and denial,” lead author Alina Kinol, a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs in Boston, U.S., told Mongabay by phone.
For example, each sector heavily promoted fracking for extracting natural gas, arguing that fracked gas is a “bridge fuel” and better for the environment than coal or oil, the researchers found. Fracking operations drill then inject high-pressure fluids into gas-containing shale rocks to fracture them. Numerous studies have found that fracking emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and a significant driver of climate change. Fracking is also linked to serious health problems, including cancer.
“This paper is interesting because it shows that the fossil fuel industry, plastics industry, and agricultural chemicals industry all promote forms of climate denial on social media, and their messages are largely aligned with each other,” Ben Franta, associate professor of climate litigation at the University of Oxford, U.K., who wasn’t involved with the study, told DeSmog.
Each organization also engaged heavily with the U.S. Energy Information Agency in their tweets (with 813 mentions) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (795 mentions), which the researchers say shows a “high level of policy or regulatory engagement, particularly with energy and environmental issues.”
Banner image: A network map of the social media connections between key players in the U.S. energy, plastics and agrichemicals industries. Image courtesy of Kinol et al. (2025).
