Twitter spam for the KeystoneXL pipeline

Let’s say you have a multi-billion dollar oil pipeline that’s not as popular as you’d like it to be in the country it’ll travel through…what do you do? How about a little social media lobbying? Maybe create some fake Twitter accounts and start sending around copious links to materials in support of your project? That’s what a lobbyist for TransCanada’s KeystoneXL has done, according to a campaign director for the Rainforest Action Network.

The Keystone XL pipeline would traverse the length of the US Midwest, travelling over 1,500 miles from Alberta to Texas, bringing crude oil from Canadian tar sands to American oil refineries. It’s a large project at $16 billion but the Canadian company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, needs US State Department approval to move forward.

Along the proposed route, the pipeline has met some resistance. The Governor of the state of Nebraska, through which the pipeline would pass, wrote a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern that the Keystone KL pipeline would travel over an aquifer that supplies his state with water. Another TransCanada pipeline spilled more than a dozen times in its first year of operations.

Online, opposition has gathered around the Twitter hashtag #tarsands. Users have expressed concern about the potential for spills and increased carbon emissions. However, in the feed of tweets labelled #tarsands, new voices suddenly began appearing. These new voices offered “The real facts on #tarsands” and either a link to an American Petroleum Institute information page, to the Nebraska Energy Forum (a group sponsored by the API), or to a pro-pipeline article.

Brant Olson, a campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) noticed the tweets and suspected they were Twitter spam. He compiled a list of what he believed were 15 fake Twitter accounts, all with unique user names and detailed biographical information. Olson connected the Twitter accounts to Keith Brockmann, a paralegal in a law firm run by a registered lobbyist for the Nebraska Energy Forum. The accounts have since been deactivated.

The Stream attempted to contact both Brant Olson and the American Petroleum Institute but has not yet received a reply.

These are some of the social media elements featured in this segment of The Stream.