Rania Khalek is a Lebanese-American journalist based in Beirut and the host of Dispatches on BreakThrough News. She returned to Current Affairs to give Digital Editor John Ross an update on Lebanon, where Israel has continued bombing, occupying territory, issuing displacement orders, and demolishing villages during what is being called a “ceasefire.”

So apparently the Trump administration has decided that what Cuba really needs right now—after decades of economic strangulation, CIA assassination attempts, sabotage campaigns, invasions, sanctions, blackouts, shortages, and more than half a century of failed regime-change policy—is the indictment of 94-year-old revolutionary icon Raúl Castro.

Not long ago, a social media creator named Ludovico “Pato” Cordoni appeared on the TikTok account of the Italian utility company Plenitude. In the video, Cordoni takes the channel’s 116,600 followers on a trip to the company’s headquarters, where he talks with a manager about helping customers improve energy efficiency. The manager likes his job, he tells Cordoni, because it allows him “to create something different and something sustainable”, which is “what makes the working day most stimulating”.

The two also trade advice on everyday ways to save energy, like keeping the heat on steadily at a low temperature rather than turning it on and off at a higher temperature. The manager tells Cordoni that Plenitude encourages employees to care about these kinds of small actions.

It’s not a random post. Cordoni is a member of the “Plenitude Creator Team”, a group of six social media influencers tasked with producing content for the company that helps “tell the story of the energy transition through different languages, formats, and perspectives”, according to Plenitude’s website. They were selected from a group of 15 aspiring creators who attended a five-day workshop in Milan last September called the “Be a PleniDude Creator Bootcamp”.

Plenitude, which operates in more than 15 countries in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region, is a relatively new name in the Italian energy sector. It is a 2022 rebranding of a company formerly called Eni gas e luce (Eni gas and light), and a subsidiary of Eni, Italy’s largest oil and gas company. While Plenitude is a “società benefit,” an Italian legal designation for for-profit companies that incorporate positive social and environmental impact into their business goals, Eni has full management control of the company under Article 2497 of the Italian civil code. The connection between the two companies is visible in their shared logo of a six-legged dog: Eni’s canine breathes fire, while Plenitude’s barks at the sun.

On its home page, Plenitude describes itself as having a “distinctive model” that integrates the production and distribution of renewable energy with an “extensive network” of electric vehicle charging points.

The careful wording — just like the rebranding away from Eni gas e luce — omits the fact that renewable energy accounts for less than a quarter of Plenitude’s gross revenues, with the rest coming from retail electricity and gas sales to around 10 million customers. While it is likely that some renewably produced electricity is sold by the retail arm, Plenitude reported core revenues from the two businesses separately in 2025: 900 million euros ($1.05 billion) from electricity and gas, and 200 million euros from renewable energy production.

Major oil and gas companies, including Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies, have been hiring social media influencers for years to shape public perceptions of their role in producing the planet-heating carbon emissions fueling the climate crisis. In Britain alone, fossil fuel firms have paid more than 100 influencers to promote their brands since 2017 in campaigns that garnered millions of views, a DeSmog investigation found.

Shell enlisted British inventor Colin Furze, who has 12.5 million followers on YouTube, to co-host a six-week virtual competition “challenging students to solve real-life energy challenges” in a campaign created by advertising agency EssenceMediacom. According to an award submission, the competition generated 127 million views.  

Shell also sponsored explorer Robert Swan and his son, Barney, to travel to the South Pole and promote its “renewable” biofuels, with Shell distributing their content widely on social media. Edelman, the U.S. public relations giant behind the campaign, said on its website that the expedition organically reached 600 million people on social media and was so successful that it increased “positive attitudes towards [Shell]” by 12%, and made Shell’s audience “31% more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”.

Fellow British oil major BP has funded family lifestyle influencers to promote its rewards app and improve its public image, with campaigns generating at least 675,000 likes and 5 million views across 17 creators. Meanwhile, France’s TotalEnergies invested millions of euros in an influencer campaign that set a Guinness World Record, mobilizing over 400 creators to dance to the same song on Instagram in a single hour.

Plenitude’s boot camp represents a different approach: Instead of purchasing existing influencer credibility through one-off collaborations, the company recruited a mix of aspiring and mid-level creators, trained them in its own framing of the energy transition and signed the six winners to year-long contracts to produce content for its social channels.

“The boot camp is more sophisticated than a one-off brand deal,” said Laura Ranzato, executive director of Clean Creatives, a group campaigning for the advertising and public relations industry to stop working with fossil fuel companies. “It’s a conditioning exercise to shape how these influencers understand climate and energy issues.”

On Oct. 13, about a month after the boot camp, a joint report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warned that with the increase in average global temperatures on the verge of reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius, humanity has entered a “danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people,” from mass die-offs of warm water corals to the collapse of polar ice sheets. A related declaration, endorsed by more than 640 scientists and 585 other signatories, stressed that countries must halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and “accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.”

The report’s authors were explicit: While individual behavior changes matter — such as incrementally tweaking your thermostat settings — personal actions are no substitute for policies that bring a rapid end to the fossil fuel era, from heavily taxing carbon pollution to economy-wide phaseouts of coal, oil and gas.

Casting call

The boot camp had no shortage of applicants.

Applicants to an online casting call needed to be Italian residents, ages 20 to 40, with at least one active Instagram or TikTok profile. Out of more than 500 who applied, according to Plenitude, the 15 applicants who made the final cut ranged from aspiring creators with a few thousand followers to influencers with followings in the hundreds of thousands, posting on topics such as science and technology, comedy, music and lifestyle.

The contestants gathered in Milan for the five-day training, led by Ginevra Panci, a participant in a past Plenitude influencer campaign with more than 800,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. The goal was to learn how to “translate technical complexity into accurate, engaging and accessible content” about renewable energy, “tailored to platforms like TikTok”, as reported by Italian trade publication Youmark. 

Panci did not respond to a request for comment.

In October, Plenitude began posting reality-TV-style TikToks chronicling each day of the boot camp, following contestants as they attended sessions on clean energy topics such as electric vehicles and wind power, followed by content creation challenges. Each episode generated 2 million to 3 million views.

One challenge tasked the contestants with “mak[ing] the sun into a TikTok character” highlighting why the sun represents “the future of energy.” Others ranged from creating 60-second sketches on “the history of energy” to planning an itinerary that included stops at Plenitude stations to charge an electric car.

The final episode, posted in December, revealed the six winning boot campers selected for the Plenitude Creator Team, an editorial squad tasked with “tell[ing] the story of the energy transition through different languages, formats, and perspectives”, according to Plenitude’s website, for a campaign “making energy an increasingly relatable, understandable, and relevant topic for younger generations”:

• Cordoni has around 35,000 YouTube followers and posts news-style videos interspersed with more sensationalist first-person challenges, such as spending a night in Rome’s central train station “between violence, drugs, and robberies”.
• Sergio Nappi, who has more than 50,000 TikTok followers, posts brief comedy sketches on topics like dating or his futile struggle to soften his strong Neapolitan accent. On Plenitude’s website, Nappi is described as “an engineer with an ironic, practical approach to technology.”
• Alexandra Bianca Burca, an environmental engineering student and model, posts about her daily life. She is one of the more aspirational creators, with a little under 5,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
• Gianluca Buttà has around 15,000 followers on TikTok, where he also posts about his daily life. Plenitude’s website describes him as “performer and creator who tells the story of energy through movement, experiences, and connecting with people.”
• Andrea Luparello, an energy engineer, has a personal profile on Instagram with a little over 1,000 followers.
• Alessia Terzano is a science communicator with a few thousand followers across TikTok and Instagram. The posts on her Instagram profile cover science and technology news and promote women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.  

As of mid-May, 36 posts by the creator squad had appeared on Plenitude’s TikTok, each amassing millions of views. The first, a record of Cordoni’s Jan. 22 trip to Plenitude, had around 3.3 million views. The second, with 3.1 million views, from squad member Buttà expanded on the theme of how utility customers can save energy, with Buttà quizzing a character called “Professor Spoiler” on tips for lowering home energy use — such as whether to unplug chargers, or use the microwave instead of the oven to reheat food — in a casual, quiz-show format designed for TikTok. A sample exchange:

Butta: “Let’s start. Replacing halogen bulbs with LED bulbs?”

Professor Spoiler: “True.”

Butta: “Correct. Using a power strip with a switch to eliminate standby consumption?”

Professor Spoiler: “True, but you actually have to use it. Don’t expect miracles. And you need to keep switching it off, otherwise it’s pointless.”

Asked for comment, Plenitude said the boot camp’s objective was “to provide small creators, or aspiring creators, with theoretical and practical knowledge useful for correctly disseminating content related to the world of energy and preventing the use of potentially misleading claims and the dissemination of false or misleading information through social channels.”

Plenitude said it uses its social media channels “exclusively to share content related to its business areas renewable energy production, provision of solutions for households and businesses”.

In response to a request for comment on Plenitude’s influencer marketing strategy, parent company Eni said, “Plenitude develops its communications initiatives independently of Eni, while still informing Eni of their content” and that Eni sees “no reason why the Company should mention Eni in its own communications campaigns and initiatives”.

The agencies helping Plenitude reach Gen Z

EY Studio and M&C Saatchi Milano, which have managed all digital communication for Eni and its subsidiaries since June 2022, were behind the boot camp’s brand strategy, creative direction and digital amplification. Zelo, a Gen Z consultancy, provided cultural insights and TikTok strategy expertise for the program.

BSA Studio managed the production of the TikTok miniseries.

Both M&C Saatchi Milano and Zelo claimed credit for the work through the Italian trade press, including full team credits. As of March 2026, M&C Saatchi Milano had not published any of its work for Plenitude on its portfolio website. Zelo’s site, which in late 2025 displayed only a “configuration in progress” message, now showcases the consultancy’s Gen Z research and strategy services. There is no case study of its work for Plenitude.  

The PleniDude Bootcamp resembles an earlier EY+M&C Saatchi and Zelo creation called Plenitude House, a TikTok reality series launched during Italy’s 2024 Sanremo Music Festival, a wildly popular event where the country’s Eurovision Song Contest entry is selected. This series assembled six housemates — influencers with a combined audience of 3.4 million followers, including Panci — who took on daily energy and sustainability challenges across “fashion, sustainable mobility, shopping and house cleaning,” such as using appliances “more consciously” and designing “circular” fashion outfits. The participants also created vlogs, expert interviews and behind-the-scenes content.

Influencer campaigns work “because younger audiences, particularly on TikTok and YouTube, are deeply skeptical of anything institutional,” said Ranzato, the executive director of Clean Creatives. “When a creator tells you to unplug your devices or lower your thermostat, it reads as a life tip from someone you trust rather than a fossil fuel industry distraction.”

The 60 pieces of Plenitude House content, which have been viewed more than 16 million times according to Plenitude, focus entirely on these types of individual consumer choices. The participants appear authentically engaged, the information is accurate and each post complies with legal disclosure requirements. Multiplied by millions of followers and views, however, the overall message is that the transition to cleaner energy can be accomplished via individual consumer choices — rather than government regulation and collective action.

“It doesn’t surprise me that these fossil fuel companies are training creators to really individualize everything,” said Mikaela Loach, a climate justice activist, author and social media campaigner. “It’s because they want us to focus so much on our individual behavior, and obsess over that, that we don’t look at them — at the fact that these companies are making billions, money that is inconceivable to most of us, and profiting so much from destruction.”

The fossil fuel sector knew by the mid-1960s, at least, that its products were heating the climate. In the U.S., companies such as Exxon, Chevron and Shell and their lobby groups responded by spreading distrust of climate science and fighting moves to cut emissions and other energy reforms.

As social and political pressures forced the industry to move on from outright denial, advertising and public relations agencies have found creative ways to shift culpability from their fossil fuel clients to the public, such as popularizing the concept of reducing one’s “carbon footprint” — the notion that individuals can help significantly curb global heating by changing personal habits. This goes back to 2004, when the advertising and public relations giant Ogilvy created the concept for BP as part of its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign.

Exxon Mobil used “narratives fixated on individual responsibility,” such as “We are all to blame” or “Society must inevitably rely on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future,” according to a 2021 peer-reviewed analysis of more than 300 public Exxon Mobil documents, including 76 paid editorials in The New York Times, by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran.

Companies such as Chevron, RWE, and Shell have shifted away from science denial as well, new research shows. Such companies are seeking to defeat lawsuits seeking climate damages by arguing that the real responsibility for the crisis rests with modern industrial society’s soaring energy demands — overlooking the industry’s active role in blocking climate policies via lobbying and disinformation.

‘Infiltrate the influencer world’

Italy’s environmental press cast a jaundiced eye on the boot camp. Writing for Valori, a sustainable finance news site, Lorenzo Tecleme characterized the initiative as part of Eni’s broader strategy to “shape a new generation of influencers” who would communicate about energy “using the language of Italy’s fossil fuel giant.”

Greenpeace Italy climate campaigner Federico Spadini told Tecleme that the boot camp was part of Eni’s established pattern of associating Plenitude with “things far from fossil fuel imagery,” such as sponsoring the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, which took place in February.

“Only Plenitude’s logo is green and friendly,” Spadini was quoted as saying. “The rest is a massive cover to continue emitting greenhouse gases and profiting at the expense of people and the planet.” 

Italia che Cambia, an environmental journalism site, dedicated a podcast episode to analyzing the boot camp as part of what host Andrea Degl’Innocenti called Eni’s systematic effort to “infiltrate the influencer world”. Degl’Innocenti traced Eni’s other partnerships with Italian content creators — from actor Paolo Ruffini (2 million Instagram followers) to travel blogger Manuela Vitulli (171,000 Instagram followers) — and speculated on what the boot camp could accomplish for the oil and gas giant.

“Perhaps Eni wants to create a cohort of influencers, young creators possibly acting in good faith,” Degl’Innocenti said, “and turn them into megaphones for fossil greenwashing.” While fact-checking mechanisms might counter such efforts, he cautioned that, “we need to stay alert because Eni has enormous financial firepower, capable of funding half of Italian YouTube on its own.”

In October, the Italian climate campaign group ReCommon launched a campaign dubbed #ZeroFossile in response to the Plenitude boot camp, inviting content creators to publicly distance themselves from fossil fuel industry influence.

#ZeroFossile featured in environmental news outlets such as Valori and Envi.info, and on activist networks, but garnered limited media attention. Its reach remains a fraction of Plenitude’s influencer operations, which command millions of followers.

Both ReCommon and Greenpeace Italy are engaged in litigation with Eni. In May 2023, the two organizations jointly filed a giusta causa (or just cause) case seeking to compel the company to cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels, in line with scientific recommendations for meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to avert catastrophic climate change. Since the Italian government owns a 33% stake in Eni, the case also named the Ministry of Economy and Finance and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a prominent public development bank, as co-defendants in their capacity as major shareholders.

Eni responded by filing a countersuit in July 2023 for defamation against both groups, which ReCommon’s spokesperson Luca Manes characterized as “a diversion to shift attention from the giusta causa and keep us busy in legal quagmires, wasting time and money on our defense.” 

Following a landmark ruling by Italy’s Supreme Court in July 2025 that civil courts have jurisdiction over climate cases against private companies, the case is now entering its substantive trial phase in Rome’s civil court.

Regarding its countersuits, Eni said it filed them because the groups have made false and “extremely serious” accusations that it is “acting criminally in the exercise of its legitimate business activities and therefore being responsible — including legally — for the deaths of thousands of human beings. This accusation is intolerable for Eni and the thousands of people who work there every day.”

Hard numbers

Eni, which ranks among the world’s fossil fuel supermajors, says Plenitude’s focus on natural gas and renewables is central to its stated goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In a research note published in April, Carbon Tracker, a London-based financial think tank, rated the design of Eni’s near-term targets for reducing emissions from its oil and gas operations ahead of those put forward by any of its rivals.

But evidence of relative ambition should not be mistaken for a clean bill of climate health.

About 93.5% of the total energy Eni produced in 2024 came from the oil and gas it extracted, compared with 1.1% from its renewable power generation, according to an analysis by Paris-based research and advocacy group Reclaim Finance. With Eni planning to boost its oil and gas output by 2% to 3% a year until 2030, the company is on course to overshoot the amount of production compatible with the International Energy Agency’s net-zero road map by 78%, the analysis found.

For now, Plenitude still only represents a relatively small portion of Eni’s business despite its prominent role in the company’s public relations strategy.

Eni reported a net profit of 2.61 billion euros in 2025 on 82.15 billion euros in revenues from its core operations. Plenitude’s net profit, by contrast, was less than 10% of that figure — 254 million euros — on revenues of 10.17 billion euros.

Eni’s current investments also skew heavily toward fossil fuels: Capital expenditures on oil and gas exploration and production of around 6 billion euros in 2024 dwarfed total capital expenditure of 887 million euros at Plenitude, Reclaim Finance found. Put another way, for every euro Eni spent on its Plenitude business, which includes (but isn’t limited to) renewable power generation, Eni spent over 6 euros to find and produce oil and gas — while also distributing more than 5 euros to shareholders.

In common with other oil majors, Eni has been walking back its investments in cleaner energy, Reclaim Finance found.

The company slashed its planned spending on renewables to 1.4 billion euros in its 2025 business plan from a planned 1.8 billion euros it had set out the previous year — a 22% drop. Critics also argue that Eni’s decarbonization strategy hinges on a combination of promises to substitute natural gas for oil, build out renewables, develop biofuels and deploy carbon capture and storage technologies that face a host of economic, environmental and technical hurdles.

Eni disputed Reclaim Finance’s analysis, saying that its 2025-28 plan aims to “allocate over 30% of its spending to lower-carbon projects, amounting to approximately 13 billion euros, including the development of renewable electricity and biofuels.”

DeSmog was unable to establish how much of that figure was dependent on natural gas — which Eni considers “lower carbon” despite the fact that it is comprised of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas pollutant, and emits planet-heating carbon dioxide when burned. “Eni believes that gas has a role as a bridge energy source in the transition and will dominate Eni’s overall production mix — over 60% by 2030 and over 90% by 2050,” the company said in a statement.

Eni described Plenitude as “a fundamental part of [its] energy transition journey,” and said that, combined, Plenitude and Eni’s biofuels subsidiary Enilive “have been valued by the market … at approximately 24 billion euros”, making them “far from greenwashing initiatives.”

Corporate largesse

Unlike fossil fuel companies in some European countries that face sustained political criticism, Eni is largely well liked in Italy. Along with the green sheen provided by Plenitude, Eni directly cultivates public goodwill with extensive sporting, cultural and educational sponsorships, including of the Italian national soccer team. Enilive signed a three-year title sponsorship of Series A soccer worth approximately 22 million euros per year from 2024 to 2027.

Eni has been a long-standing partner of the La Scala opera house in Mlian, while Plentitude began sponsoring the Sanremo Music Festival in 2022 at the time of its rebrand from Eni Gas e Luce. Eni also has close ties to Italian higher education, providing some 10 million euros to state-funded universities and collaborating in about a hundred partnerships in 2022, according to a report by Greenpeace Italy and ReCommon.

Eni CEO Claude Descalzi, 71, has served across four consecutive Italian administrations spanning the political spectrum since he took the helm in May 2014, positioning him as the world’s longest-serving head of an oil major. In April 2026, the government of Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, president of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, nominated Descalzi to a record fifth three-year term. As Italian journalist Gianni Dragoni noted in his blog, Eni had increased its spending on “advertising, promotion and communications activities” to 130 million euros in 2025 from an average of 76 million euros during the previous three years. “This boom in consensus-building spending” occurred as Descalzi was seeking reappointment, Dragoni wrote. “Just a coincidence?”

Meanwhile, Meloni has made Eni central to her “Mattei Plan” for Africa, a 5.5 billion euro initiative launched in January 2024 to strengthen ties with African countries through investment in energy, agriculture, water, health and education. Descalzi and other Eni executives have accompanied Meloni on state visits to Algeria, Libya, the United Arab Emirates and the Republic of Congo to sign gas supply agreements.

The Alleanza Verdi Sinistra, an alliance of green and left parties, is Eni’s only consistent critic in government. The group wants to tax the windfall profits of energy companies and has staged protests at Eni headquarters.

Critics say the company has sidestepped wider scrutiny in part through its ties with Italian media.

Eni has owned Agenzia Giornalistica Italia (AGI), one of Italy’s main news agencies, since 1965, and climate advocates allege that the company’s advertising spending and legal firepower exert a chilling effect on climate accountability journalism.

The Italian press largely failed to scrutinize environmental claims related to a “sustainability-linked” bond issued by Eni in January 2023, according to an analysis by Greenpeace Italy and Voxeurop. Of 32 relevant articles that appeared in Italy’s five main newspapers, the research found, none critically examined the bond’s limitations, and 37.5% incorrectly described it as a “green bond” or “sustainable bond,” which are distinct types of financial instruments used to finance specific environmental projects. The five newspapers also ran a combined total of 71 advertisements for Eni at the time the bond was issued, according to the analysis, including 30 specifically promoting the offer.

The report quoted Roberto Giovannini, a former environmental journalist at Italian daily La Stampa, as saying that reporters practice “a sort of self-censorship” due to the influence Eni wields.

In April 2025, the Corriere della Sera newspaper declined to publish an advertisement by Greenpeace Italy highlighting the financial hold Eni and other polluters exert over the Italian press, the environmental group said in a statement.

“We love newspapers and believe that good journalism can play a crucial role in protecting the planet, but we are convinced that the excessive power of fossil fuel companies over the media is a threat to press freedom, democracy and the planet’s climate,” Greenpeace Italy said.

‘Educational angle’

DeSmog was able to identify 14 of the 15 participants in the Plenitude creator boot camp and reached out to them for comment. Eleven responded. As reporters corresponded with the influencers, it became clear that the participants were in contact with one another regarding our inquiries. Several said they would be available to talk in the near future but then stopped replying to our requests. Two emailed detailed answers to our questions: Francesco Liguori, a boot camper who was not selected for the Plenitude Creator Team, and Alessia Terzano, who was.

Liguori told us that he “never perceived a commercial intent or the desire to ‘sell’ Plenitude to participants.” The trainees “worked extensively on storytelling, digital communication, sustainability, energy transition and creator responsibility. A key focus was on how to make complex topics accessible without oversimplifying or distorting them. Above all, we actually learned how certain technologies worked, such as wind turbines or photovoltaic panels.”

Terzano initially said that she needed to consult Plenitude before answering our questions. In a subsequent email, she described mornings during the boot camp as dedicated to meetings and workshops on topics like “the history of energy, photovoltaics, wind power, electric mobility,” and afternoons on “the practical part,” i.e., video creation. The group “saw up-close how creative agencies work,” she said.

Terzano now collaborates “in the role of content creator together with the other five boot camp winners,” she said. “We follow the entire process, from ideation to the production of the final content, based on the editorial plan.” It was not possible to establish the nature of the editorial plan Terzano referenced, or what role Plenitude may have played in shaping the content the creators produce.

“In particular, my content has a more educational angle,” Terzano said. “I try to turn technical topics into videos suitable for social media.”

In addition to working with the creator team, Plenitude continues to use young micro-influencers to build brand affinity. During this year’s Sanremo Music Festival, Plenitude deployed several creators to promote its physical store and current offers through videos featuring gadget giveaways and audience interactions. Another series targeted at music events, known as Plenitude Unplugged, is co-branded with Rolling Stone magazine.

‘Battle for social license’

Plenitude ran its creator boot camp by the book. Posts displayed visible sponsorship tags and shared genuine energy-saving tips. There’s no public record of complaints about the content with Italy’s Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, a competition authority that can fine companies up to 5 million euros for greenwashing, or the Istituto dell’Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria, the advertising industry’s self-regulation body.

It’s beyond these organizations’ scope to regulate the more subtle message the project conveyed: that climate action is a matter of personal choices to keep the heating low, unplug the charger, or switch to a greener electricity tariff, rather than a crisis demanding a rapid phase-out of Eni’s primary products.

“Social media is a plane on which the battle for social license is being fought and maintained,” said Loach, the climate justice activist, referring to the informal permission that the public gives a company or industry to operate in the community.

“They will work with creators in order to maintain this social license, so they can continue to be welcomed — into climate conferences, into cultural institutions,” she said, “despite the enormous amount of climate science showing that this industry is heading us towards destruction.”

Plenitude has not said whether it will repeat the boot camp, but the model has already proved its worth: millions of views, no friction with regulators and a generation of communicators trained from the ground up on how to spin responsibility away from corporations and onto consumers.

Francesco Liguori, one of the participants who wasn’t selected for Plenitude’s influencer team, said the boot camp was a genuine learning experience. He’s probably right, and that may have been precisely the point.

Additional reporting by Sharon Kelly and Ellen Ormesher

The post ‘Be a PleniDude’: How an Italian Oil Giant Conquered TikTok appeared first on Truthdig.