Defending “Canadian Energy”: Connective Leadership and Extractive Populism on Canadian Facebook

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a content and discourse analysis of the Facebook activity of pro-fossil fuel advocates in Canada, including industry-funded and independent groups. It explores how the fossil fuel industry and its allies have reacted to growing public demand for climate action by adopting a “subsidised public strategy,” in which elites provide stakeholders with resources to participate in an organized campaign. We argue that pro-oil advocacy groups utilize their Facebook pages to exercise “connective leadership,” in which key social media accounts strategically shape internet-enabled social movements by promoting mobilization opportunities, connecting supporters with diverse content, and reframing that content to communicate a coherent “extractive populist” storyline positioning “Canadian Energy” as a national public good under attack by foreigners and elites. We thereby provide insight into how industry and its allies leverage platform affordances to promote populist politics on Facebook to defend industry in the face of the climate crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• fossil fuels
• populism
• social media
• public relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data available on request.

Notes

1 A detailed quantitative analysis of the repurposing and sharing of third party material is found in previous work from two of the authors of this piece (Neubauer & Graham, 2021). The discourse analysis that follows builds on that work, while exploring how these shared materials are used to communicate different frames and a broader discursive storyline.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Heritage, and the Corporate Mapping Project.