For fourteen years, Chevron has played Regina George by using the Amazon Post (and its Spanish-language affiliate websites) as their Big Oil Burn Book. Their mission statement of sorts is viewable on the Wayback Machine:
The false news and misleading information [30,000 Indigenous Peasant Farmers] put out deserves to be corrected-and the public has a right to know the truth. This is Chevron’s blog to set the record straight!
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https://web.archive.org/web/20100128201513/http://theamazonpost.com/
To date, the Wall Street Journal has run nine pro-Chevron, anti-Donziger opinion pieces. Plenty of other major outlets have argued in their favor.
Chevron is still putting paid spend behind the website on Twitter. Spend too much time researching Steven , you’ll likely start to see them. As recently as October 2022, academic (and NeoliberalHell pod co-host) Matthew J. Donovan confirmed that Chevron had created approximately 9,000 backlinks to the Amazon Post.
(Google ranks websites based on the number of other websites that link back to them — manufacturing “backlinks” is a way to boost credibility and visibility). Calculating the price of an effort like this is difficult. But with a reasonable price per backlink at about $500, it wouldn’t be unrealistic to estimate total spend on promoting the Amazon Post at north of $4.5 million dollars — that’s before factoring in fees paid to an agency providing these services.
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