The Mid-Term Elections, Big Oil and Social Media Aside from political donations to support particular campaigns which, as noted above, are extremely difficult to track, much attention in recent years has been paid to the role of sophisticated, targeted social media campaigns aimed at influencing elections around the world. Following a number of related controversies surrounding the 2016 US Presidential Election and the UK’s Brexit vote, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have implemented systems for public searching and tracking of political ads on their platforms. Using Facebook’s disclosure facility (covering both Facebook and Instagram) InfluenceMap has identified significant investment in political social media advertising by the oil majors and their agents. Such data for 2018 indicates concentrated ad purchasing around the US midterm elections, when $2M was spent on Facebook and Instagram ads in just four weeks. During the midterm elections, “ballot initatives” and other referendum-like mechanisms are used for key decisions of interest in certain states. As with all other elections, these also represent an opportunity for interest groups to lobby. The infographic below details the five states most targeted by the oil majors’ political advertising in the four weeks leading up to the November 6th elections. It demonstrates how the companies have used sophisticated social media advertising techniques to help swing key climate and energy decisions in their favour. 18 InfluenceMap March 2019