“Nation shall speak rubbish unto nation”
Well it finally happened!
Industry astroturfers Backing Fracking have at long last created their own website, 2 years after collecting over £1100 for the purpose. On each page of the site they repeat the claim that “Backing Fracking is a residents collective”
We imagine that Backing Fracking must subconsciously referring to the halcyon days of the Soviet workers’ collectives and Stalin’s first 5 year plan.
Sadly collectivisation created a large-scale famine in the Soviet Union in which many millions died and civil resistance was common. We confidently expect fracking in Lancashire to be equally well received by the local proletariat.
We do of course know more than a little about exactly who these “residents” really are. See our previous investigation here.
But come on guys! Did you really expect people to be so naive as to believe that a few anonymous local residents would get together and pay a large monthly subscription to Nationbuilder – the social campaign management web site, which has been described as “the mercenary software that powered Trump and Brexit”.
I mean that’s not the sort of thing that we might expect from an astroturfing group at all is it? 😂
[The use of Nationbuilder by major political campaigns, and questions about it’s role as a data controller are discussed here]
I wonder how much it would cost Backing Fracking if just a few people from each of the hundreds of anti-fracking groups in the UK signed up to their subscription based model. It could get very messy for them indeed!
So what is the content like? Well it’s the usual mix of straw men, half truths and misdirections that we have come to expect from the industry’s most vocal and rabid mouthpiece, although they do seem to be making an effort to sanitise their image away from the ugly macho posturing which characterises their Facebook feed these days.
However, it seems that their attention to detail gets lost in their frantic need to persuade. Take this as an example.
Now, even they admit on the same website that :
180 people using 150 litres a day would use just 27,000 litres. It would take 180 THOUSAND people to use 27,000 cubic metres in a day.
Who knows, perhaps the same person was hired to put the content together as did the site at “Lancashire For Shale” who announced that there were only 2281 cubic feet of gas in “the area”.
Given that we use about 3,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas a year in the UK that would keep us going for at least 0.2 seconds.
For what this massive PR exercise must be costing them you’d really think they’d pay a bit more attention to detail wouldn’t you?
