As GOP dig­i­tal strate­gist Mindy Finn explained to Politi­co: “[Dig­i­tal orga­niz­ing is] not just raw num­bers. It’s ana­lyz­ing and deter­min­ing who those peo­ple [who are engag­ing] are and match­ing them back to vot­er pro­files. … It’s not hav­ing the most Face­book likes and clicks, because the ​‘who’ matters.”

While only age, sex and state infor­ma­tion for each ad is pro­vid­ed by the Face­book Ad Library, Face­book allows ad buy­ers to tar­get ads based on actu­al online behav­ior, in addi­tion to self-report­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics like work and edu­ca­tion. It can tar­get using online shop­ping and brows­ing his­to­ry, for exam­ple, and whether a per­son is like­ly to engage with con­ser­v­a­tive or lib­er­al polit­i­cal content.

​“With that kind of tar­get­ing,” Lucy Pur­don says, ​“you don’t know what infor­ma­tion has been gath­ered about you, from who, and how you’ve been targeted.”

“Face­book says it’s not a one-to-one match of an iden­ti­fi­able indi­vid­ual,” says dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy crit­ic Sara Wat­son, ​“but the more ele­ments that you start to tar­get against,” the clos­er you can get to iden­ti­fy­ing indi­vid­ual people.

Exxon’s social media approach is unusu­al­ly brazen, accord­ing to Collins of Influ­enceMap. He tells In These Times that Exxon’s use of social media to lob­by the pub­lic goes way beyond the rest of the indus­try, a claim sup­port­ed by the company’s abnor­mal­ly high spend­ing on Face­book polit­i­cal ads. Typ­i­cal­ly, such tac­tics would be used by polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions or trade asso­ci­a­tions, not direct­ly by corporations.

“It does feel nov­el that the ads would not be about the prod­uct but the inter­ests of the com­pa­ny,” Wat­son says. She likens Exxon’s use of social media ads to the work­ings of ​“a Super PAC, but on a much more gran­u­lar scale.”

In the 11,622 Exxon ads exam­ined for this arti­cle, on aver­age, 16% of those who saw each ad were men old­er than 65, 16% women old­er than 65, and anoth­er 16% men between 55 and 64. In con­trast, only about 15% were users 18 – 34 (of any gen­der). Despite the fact that peo­ple old­er than 65 were a third of those who saw a typ­i­cal Exxon ad, the group rep­re­sents only 16% of the total U.S. pop­u­la­tion. Fur­ther­more, younger peo­ple use social media more than old­er ones. Pew Research Cen­ter has used polling to track social media adop­tion for the past sev­er­al years, report­ing last year that 79% peo­ple 18– to 29-years-old are on Face­book and 67% use Insta­gram, com­pared to just 46% and 8%, respec­tive­ly, of senior cit­i­zens. Although both Face­book and Exxon declined to com­ment on what fil­ters Exxon uses to tar­get its ads, this dis­pro­por­tion­al­i­ty sug­gests the ads are not being sent at random.

Since Exxon’s pri­ma­ry busi­ness does not involve sell­ing direct­ly to indi­vid­u­als (the com­pa­ny decid­ed to exit the gas sta­tion busi­ness in 2008), Wat­son says Exxon’s per­son­al tar­get­ing could build a case for con­sumer pro­tec­tion, since ​“most con­sumers should not have a direct rela­tion­ship with Exxon.” She adds, ​“So what right does Exxon have in col­lect­ing any con­sumer data at all, aside from aggre­gate infor­ma­tion about con­sumer trends?”

Exxon declined to com­ment on how it uses indi­vid­ual data, but a few recent exam­ples reveal how the oil indus­try as a whole is embrac­ing the strate­gies Exxon has been rely­ing upon.

Take the Texas con­tro­ver­sy ear­li­er this year over some­thing called pro­ra­tioning, the (now) rarely used gov­ern­ment author­i­ty to reg­u­late oil quo­tas to smooth out fluc­tu­a­tions in the U.S. oil mar­ket. The author­i­ty hasn’t been exer­cised in Texas since the 1970s, but this past spring, the Covid-19 shut­down led to an oil glut so large there was nowhere to store any more oil. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion ordered the U.S. Strate­gic Petro­le­um Reserve to fill ​“to the very top” in March, but his pro-oil poli­cies weren’t enough to make up for the plum­met­ing glob­al demand.

The Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion con­sid­ered lim­it­ing the num­ber of bar­rels that oil com­pa­nies could pump, but free mar­ke­teers — linked to the oil indus­try—suc­ceed­ed in beat­ing back that proposal.

Mul­ti­ple ener­gy com­pa­nies cir­cu­lat­ed the same anti-pro­ra­tion form let­ter, includ­ing Exxon. The Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute (API), which includes Exxon among its mem­bers, field­ed an oper­a­tion under the name Ener­gy Cit­i­zens that used the same language.

API used a sim­i­lar play­book in a 2017 Penn­syl­va­nia cam­paign, bankrolling an orga­ni­za­tion called Cit­i­zens Against Nuclear Bailouts. As revealed in a Feb­ru­ary Atlantic arti­cle, the group tar­get­ed res­i­dents with a bar­rage of Face­book ads, direct mail and phone calls. ​“Per­haps most sur­pris­ing,” writer Robin­son Mey­er not­ed, ​“the indus­try has … actu­al­ly bor­rowed tac­tics and ideas from cli­mate activists.”

“It’s a real­ly dif­fi­cult ques­tion about what to do about” direct tar­get­ing of indi­vid­u­als with mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion, says Kathie Treen, a Ph.D. can­di­date study­ing cli­mate change mis­in­for­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Exeter, Devon, Eng­land. ​“It does raise all sorts of ques­tions about free­dom of speech and demo­c­ra­t­ic rights. Is there a demo­c­ra­t­ic right to be mis­in­formed? Whose respon­si­bil­i­ty is it and who gets to say what counts, what is mis­lead­ing and what isn’t, and whose respon­si­bil­i­ty it is to do some­thing about it?”

Clark Williams-Der­ry, an ener­gy finance ana­lyst with the pro­gres­sive Insti­tute for Ener­gy Eco­nom­ics and Finan­cial Analy­sis, says frack­ing has been ​“a com­plete and utter bust,” a ​“cash flow-neg­a­tive” busi­ness with pro­duc­tion costs so high they’ve dri­ven many upstart inde­pen­dent drilling com­pa­nies into bankruptcy.

“Are they mov­ing into shale because shale is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty,” Williams-Der­ry says, ​“or is it that there is no bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ty?” He adds it’s only a mat­ter of time before Exxon suc­cumbs to com­pe­ti­tion from renew­able ener­gy com­pa­nies and stock­hold­ers flee en masse.

Mean­while, the oil indus­try is attempt­ing to mar­ket frack­ing as a cli­mate-friend­ly ​“bridge fuel” to ease the tran­si­tion from coal and oil to renew­ables. But new research sug­gests nat­ur­al gas might actu­al­ly be con­tribut­ing more to car­bon emis­sions than coal—because of gas flar­ing from wells and leaky pipelines. Accord­ing to a 2020 study, 3.7% of the methane pro­duced in Texas’ Per­mi­an Basin (where Exxon has invest­ed in frack­ing) leaks away and nev­er makes it to mar­ket, more than twice the offi­cial EPA esti­mate for the region. Cli­mate sci­en­tists have already deter­mined that if just 3.2% of gas leaks it becomes worse than coal for cli­mate change.

“It breaks my heart,” says cli­mate sci­en­tist Peter Kalmus, ​“that we are basi­cal­ly skew­ing the planet’s future for the next 10 mil­lion years in exchange for a few more years of frack­ing, of fos­sil fuel CEOs rak­ing in record prof­its. … It’s just madness.”

Exxon’s local fights aren’t all win­ners, like the time it spent $16,000 on ads urg­ing Louisiana res­i­dents to ​“take action” in its fight against the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board over extend­ing expir­ing indus­tri­al tax breaks in Jan­u­ary 2019. Those ads were shown more than half a mil­lion times, though the com­pa­ny lost the vote.

But the trend is clear: Exxon turns to social media to push its nation­al agen­da and try to reverse its gen­er­al wan­ing pub­lic sup­port. Exxon spent up to $1.4 mil­lion on social media ads pro­mot­ing pipeline jobs, for exam­ple, appear­ing 40 mil­lion times over the two-year peri­od inves­ti­gat­ed for this arti­cle and par­tic­u­lar­ly tar­get­ing res­i­dents in states such as Michi­gan, where pipeline con­struc­tion is con­tro­ver­sial. Oth­er ads pushed for off­shore drilling in fed­er­al waters and the new trade agree­ment with Cana­da and Mexico.

“Quite frankly, grass­roots lob­by­ing is prob­a­bly the lion’s share of lob­by­ing that goes on at the fed­er­al and state lev­els — and it goes entire­ly unre­port­ed,” says Craig Hol­man, gov­ern­ment affairs lob­by­ist with the non­prof­it group Pub­lic Cit­i­zen. ​“As long as [lob­by­ists] don’t actu­al­ly knock on the door in D.C. of a mem­ber of Con­gress, it’s not actu­al­ly reported.”

Report­ed or not, indi­rect lob­by­ing is chang­ing the cor­po­rate lob­by­ing busi­ness, as illus­trat­ed by the 2019 annu­al report of the New York State Joint Com­mis­sion. In New York state alone in 2019, 24% of reg­is­tered lob­by­ists had expand­ed into indi­rect lob­by­ing efforts, though only 1% engage exclu­sive­ly in indi­rect lob­by­ing. Out of a total of $16.8 mil­lion that lob­by­ists spent on adver­tis­ing in 2019, dig­i­tal advo­ca­cy and web­sites account­ed for $3.6 mil­lion, sur­pass­ing the $2.9 mil­lion spent on print advertising.

Hol­man adds that the extent of Exxon’s social media oper­a­tion ​“prob­a­bly is evi­dence that [indi­rect lob­by­ing] is far more preva­lent today than it used to be. Social media now and the inter­net pro­vide a per­fect vehi­cle for decep­tive advertising.”

“Com­pa­nies will do it until they can’t,” says Sara Wat­son. ​“Face­book and oth­er plat­forms aren’t going to care about it until the pub­lic cares.”

In the mid-2000s, there was an attempt in Con­gress to pass a fed­er­al indi­rect lob­by­ing dis­clo­sure require­ment, but it was beat­en by what Hol­man describes as a mas­sive astro­turf cam­paign. Hol­man adds that sim­i­lar pro­pos­als do exist, but whether they even have a chance depends on the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and ​“whether or not the Democ­rats are sin­cere” about rein­ing in cor­po­rate abuses.

Even if legal dis­clo­sure require­ments are passed, Wat­son says, ​“there are huge ques­tions about the enforce­abil­i­ty of these laws,” par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to plat­forms like Face­book with a busi­ness mod­el utter­ly reliant on tar­get­ed online advertising.

Since 2011, a coali­tion of more than 70 investor groups have pushed for more dis­clo­sure of all cor­po­rate lob­by­ing efforts, sub­mit­ting more than 400 lob­by­ing pro­pos­als to dozens of com­pa­nies in the past nine years. Only sev­en pro­pos­als have received major­i­ty votes, but the issue is gain­ing momen­tum. Mul­ti­ple such pro­pos­als have been sub­mit­ted to Exxon by the Unit­ed Steel­work­ers, includ­ing one ear­li­er this year. Exxon rec­om­mend­ed share­hold­ers vote against it. It failed to pass but will be resub­mit­ted next year.

The issue con­cerns Exxon’s San­ta Ynez Unit (SYU), con­sist­ing of three off­shore oil plat­forms off the San­ta Bar­bara coast and an onshore pro­cess­ing facil­i­ty at Las Flo­res Canyon. In 2015, the pipeline Exxon used to send oil inland to refiner­ies — oper­at­ed by the Plains All Amer­i­can Pipeline com­pa­ny — spilled 140,000 gal­lons of crude onto the coast­line and into the ocean near Refu­gio State Beach. It wasn’t the first spill along this breath­tak­ing stretch of Pacif­ic Coast. The San­ta Bar­bara Spill in 1969 was the largest sin­gle event in state his­to­ry. His­to­ri­ans say it helped launch the mod­ern envi­ron­men­tal move­ment and the first Earth Day held the fol­low­ing year.

With­out that pipeline, Exxon’s three off­shore SYU plat­forms were retired. Exxon applied, in 2017, for a tem­po­rary truck­ing per­mit that would enable the com­pa­ny to reopen these wells. If approved, the com­pa­ny would run up to 70 trucks each day (about one every 20 min­utes) on Cen­tral Coast roads from SYU to Cal­i­for­nia refineries.

On August 12, the San­ta Bar­bara Coun­ty Plan­ning Com­mis­sion issued its long-await­ed rec­om­men­da­tions based on the envi­ron­men­tal impact analy­sis on Exxon’s plan. A pub­lic hear­ing was sched­uled for ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, but before that could hap­pen, Phillips 66 announced it was clos­ing its San­ta Bar­bara Coun­ty refin­ery — which Exxon had intend­ed as its pri­ma­ry des­ti­na­tion for the trucked oil.

A pos­si­ble alter­nate path would be a longer route to the Plains Pent­land Ter­mi­nal in neigh­bor­ing Kern Coun­ty. In its envi­ron­men­tal analy­sis, how­ev­er, the com­mis­sion had sug­gest­ed Exxon aban­don Pent­land alto­geth­er ​“to lim­it truck trav­el, reduce air emis­sions, and reduce the like­li­hood of acci­dents result­ing in spills due to few­er miles traveled.”

The com­mis­sion may still approve Exxon’s plan, how­ev­er, and the next step would be a final deci­sion from the San­ta Bar­bara Board of Super­vi­sors. Errin Brig­gs, super­vis­ing plan­ner in the Plan­ning Commission’s Ener­gy Divi­sion, says the project is still fea­si­ble depend­ing on what mod­i­fi­ca­tions Exxon makes to its pro­pos­al and that coun­ty offi­cials will have to weigh the risks of the oil against area eco­nom­ic benefits.

San­ta Bar­bara for Safe and Local Trans­port (SBSLT), mean­while, launched in Decem­ber 2018. SBSLT’s direct ties to Exxon are appar­ent. The San­ta Maria Sun, a local news­pa­per, spoke to Exxon Mobil’s then-SYU asset man­ag­er for a pro­file on SBSLT, and report­ed that SBSLT is ​“a joint effort between Exxon­Mo­bil and inter­est­ed San­ta Bar­bara Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers”; the group’s web­site says it’s ​“Pow­ered by Exxon SYU.”

The SBSLT web­site describes itself as ​“a coali­tion of res­i­dents and tax­pay­ers, includ­ing local busi­ness­es, teach­ers, law and safe­ty enforce­ment and Exxon­Mo­bil employ­ees.” Exxon does claim sup­port from sev­er­al unions and busi­ness cham­bers, about 30 busi­ness­es and a half dozen local lead­ers, includ­ing some cur­rent and for­mer elect­ed offi­cials. To date, SBSLT has spent more than $44,000 on social media adver­tis­ing, and Exxon has spent more than $2 mil­lion in a vari­ety of off­shore drilling ads through its pri­ma­ry page.

​“We need peo­ple to be real­is­tic about the deci­sions that must be made to live here,” Bob Set­back­en admon­ished oth­er local res­i­dents in a com­ment thread last year on the SBSLT page. He is a retired San­ta Bar­bara res­i­dent, accord­ing to his Face­book pro­file, but did­n’t return a phone call request­ing an interview.

As of Octo­ber 19, SBSLT’s Face­book page had only 408 likes and 422 fol­low­ers in a coun­ty of 450,000. The page has drawn the ire of local res­i­dents. ​“SYU is a wolf in sheep­’s cloth­ing,” San­ta Bar­bara res­i­dent Mau­reen McFad­den writes May 22. Amy Foss, anoth­er com­menter on the page, calls SBSLT ​“an oil com­pa­ny pro­pa­gan­da page, not a ​‘com­mu­ni­ty.’ ”

In Octo­ber 2019, Face­book said in an online post that it would be adding more infor­ma­tion about who is behind Face­book pages, includ­ing adding con­firmed page own­er infor­ma­tion and ver­i­fied city, phone num­ber or web­site. In Octo­ber 2020, the SBSLT page con­tin­ues to be list­ed as a ​“com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tion,” and under the ​“Page Trans­paren­cy” sec­tion, it reads: ​“San­ta Bar­bara for Safe and Local Trans­port is respon­si­ble for this Page,” mak­ing no ref­er­ence to Exxon. But the address pro­vid­ed for SBSLT in the Face­book Ad Library is an Exxon­Mo­bil address.

​“If we find a Page is con­ceal­ing its own­er­ship in order to mis­lead peo­ple, we will require it to show more infor­ma­tion about who is behind it,” said a spokesper­son for Face­book in an emailed state­ment. ​“We’re inves­ti­gat­ing if these Pages fol­low our rules.”

Beyond Face­book, oppo­si­tion to Exxon’s San­ta Bar­bara plans is fierce. The oppo­si­tion has its own grass­roots coali­tion of envi­ron­men­tal and com­mu­ni­ty groups, local gov­ern­ment sup­port­ers and more than 80 busi­ness­es. They fear how anoth­er oil spill could impact the region’s tourism and fish­ing indus­tries. Oth­er locals com­plain the roads just aren’t made to truck that much oil.

In San­ta Bar­bara, as it does across the coun­try, Exxon hopes to turn the tide on its pump­ing, truck­ing and frack­ing through its lax­ly reg­u­lat­ed social media lob­by­ing efforts; its polit­i­cal con­sul­tants and cam­paign soft­ware; and its well-fund­ed and heav­i­ly moti­vat­ed sup­port­ers. Exxon’s $16-mil­lion ad spend­ing spree under­scores that the fight against the fos­sil fuel indus­try is far from over.

Stephanie Prufer, an oceans cam­paign­er at the Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty, says she does­n’t think Exxon’s strat­e­gy will work for the com­pa­ny, espe­cial­ly among youth.

“I’m not sur­prised that Exxon is tar­get­ing the demo­graph­ic that they are,” she says, refer­ring to the fact that Exxon ads dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly appear on the screens of old­er social media users. ​“They know they are not going to be able to get the sup­port of peo­ple who are afraid for their own futures. I’m 24 and I wor­ry every sin­gle day about what will become of my future if the oil com­pa­nies keep drilling.”

“The sci­ence is so clear,” she adds. ​“We need to keep oil in the ground. We need to end drilling on our coast, not revive it.”