A Fossil Fuel Company Attempted to Fake a Grassroots Movement. It backfired.

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When fossil fuel projects are proposed in an area, it’s not uncommon for developers and local activists to jockey for the favor of local governments in their efforts for or against the new development. As the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners deliberated over the potential impacts of a proposed natural gas pipeline through their constituency, however, they experienced a new and unsettling strategy from the project’s parent company: hundreds of emails in support of the pipeline, supposedly from members of their community, turned out to be part of a spam campaign on behalf of the project’s owners. Rather than build support for the pipeline, the “ham-handed” campaigns served only to frustrate the Board of Commissioners, culminating in a unanimous resolution against the project. This raises concerns about how fossil fuel companies use deceptive practices to influence public opinion of controversial projects, especially in the age of AI.

The Southeast Supply Enhancement Project (SSEP) is a proposed natural gas pipeline by the Williams Companies-owned Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company, otherwise known as Transco. The controversial project would stretch from Virginia to Alabama, including approximately 24 miles of pipeline through Forsyth, Guilford, and Davidson Counties. As pro-pipeline and anti-pipeline groups vied for municipalities to weigh in on the project, Forsyth County Commissioner Dan Besse, said in an interview that he didn’t expect to get enough votes from the 4-3 Republican-majority board to pass a resolution against it.

“I was not at all confident that we had even four votes on the commission, and was trying to temper the expectations of the local environmental advocates on that point,” Besse said. “But Williams Companies launched such a ham-handed and obviously astroturfed email lobbying campaign that was bombarding the commissioners’ inboxes for a couple of months, that they shot themselves in the foot.”

The emails began in early July, with each commissioner receiving dozens per day for weeks. They were nearly identical in content, citing the growing population’s need for “clean and affordable” energy and calling on the local government to support the “commonsense” project. Most identified themselves as community members with valid return email addresses, names, and locations within the county, but others came from absurd email addresses like “sexdemon@mocospace.com.” As commissioners began to respond to the emails, some senders told them that they had never sent a message and, in fact, didn’t know what the SSEP was.

“Nobody ever responded saying, ‘Thanks for responding to my message.’ And that's unusual,” Besse said. “The only handful of responses that came back were from people saying, ‘I didn't send this.’”

Mass email campaigns like this are not unheard of, Chairman Donald “Don” Martin said, but they tend to involve people signing on to send a pre-formatted letter. In previous campaigns, no one had ever replied, denying they’d sent an email. 

“This was not individual people expressing their opinions. These emails were being generated by a commercial enterprise that was contracted to perform this work,” Martin said in an interview. “So that process, quite frankly, made people mad, because it continued for weeks.”

In a later work session, Martin said he confronted a Williams representative about the emails and demanded that they stop. They stopped that day.

Williams has given conflicting accounts of the incident. According to reporting by Politico’s Energywire news service, one representative said via email that “it’s possible someone might forget they submitted a letter.” Another email said that residents sent the emails themselves using a “landing page,” and that each sender was able to check draft messages before sending them to commissioners. 

Williams community relations employee Mike Atchie, however, told the board that the company had engaged “groups” to communicate with the commissioners, which he said opted in on the simple basis of supporting energy infrastructure and “meeting reliable energy needs.” When pressed, he didn’t confirm that every sender agreed to send the specific message that was delivered, sometimes multiple times, from their email address. 

The campaign traces back to CiviClick, an AI-powered grassroots advocacy agency that markets instant communication via “omni-channel communications” and an AI-powered message generator that it claims is 86% less likely to be flagged as a form email by legislative staff. In his correspondence with Energywire, CiviClick CEO Chazz Clevinger said that the company was hired by an unnamed third party on behalf of Williams to generate emails in support of the project. 

In other words, a fossil fuel company paid an external company to use an AI service to deceive local government officials into believing that Forsyth County was home to a groundswell of support for a pipeline when, in reality, no such public support existed.

“No one ever came and spoke to our group and said, ‘we really need to do this,’” Martin said.

The emails alone weren’t the reason the board voted unanimously to oppose the pipeline. Other sources of concern included the potential public safety risk of co-locating this project alongside three other natural gas pipelines, environmental impacts, and increased electric rates, according to the Aug. 28 resolution.  However, they certainly didn’t help: not only was the spam annoying, it also gave the increasing impression that Williams did not respect the County’s democratic process and could not be trusted.

“I think the fact that a company would do that just struck people as dishonest,” Martin said. “And then you begin to wonder about the veracity of what a company is telling you if they are willing to send e-mails from people who didn't know their name was being used.”

For organizations opposing the pipeline, this behavior was unusual, but not surprising. Aidan Loretz, a community organizer for environmental groups Seven Directions of Service and Haw River Assembly, described the effort as "embarrassing."

“This is who they are, you know? Like, these are their true colors,” Loretz said. “The way that they just didn't have any real regard for the people behind it and just went as hard as possible on this one thing, without really analyzing any specific information. And I think that that shows their framework of thought for dealing with pipeline projects like this.”

For Loretz, the scandal points to a deeper issue with Transco. 

“If they are this sloppy with media outreach, it's kind of a personal testimony to their organizational structure. They tend to cut a lot of corners,” Loretz said.

In a comment presented to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regarding the SSEP, the Pipeline Safety Trust laid out several safety concerns regarding the project. In addition to the environmental and climate impacts of more than 1.5 million additional dekatherms per day of natural gas, its analysis of public data indicates that Transco has a poor safety record. Even accounting for mileage, Transco is worse than other pipeline operators in terms of fatalities, cost per incident, and natural gas releases per incident. Most of the incidents along Transco’s nearly 10,000 miles of pipeline are considered “direct,” meaning that the operator was in control of the main cause of the incident and could have prevented them. Since 2008, Williams and Transco have been fined $3,418,100 for accidents and failure to follow safety procedures, including six fatalities and 102 injuries, according to data collected by YES! Weekly.

A few strange emails are one thing, Loretz said, but the implications of such a large buildout from a company with a poor record of safety and transparency can be much more dire.

“In this case, there were a couple of people that were mildly disrupted with a weird email response,” Loretz said, “but when that shows up as people getting injured and dying because of lack of safety and the lack of adequate management, then that's a little bit of a different story, right?”

Campaigns like this bring to light the concerning development of anti-democratic tactics used by fossil fuel companies, especially in the age of AI. This particular effort was a failure on the part of Williams Companies, but what happens when fossil fuel companies are able to use AI to effectively undermine public opinion and sway decision makers?