A year after San Luis Obispo took the lead in Southern California on a gas ban, the coastal  town of Santa Barbara was evaluating a similar proposal, and residents  were being spammed with texts encouraging opposition to the ban and  offering information through a new "grassroots" group: Citizens for  Balanced Energy Solutions. Except it wasn't a citizens group at all, it was a front group started by the country's largest gas utility.<p> </p><p>Learn more about your ad choices. Visit <a href="https://megaphone.fm/adchoices">megaphone.fm/adchoices</a></p>

S6, Part2 | Ep3: Anatomy of a Front Group

Drilled is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Hosted and reported by award-winning investigative climate journalists and led by Amy Westervelt, each season unravels new evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach.In 2016, Facebook Live was just getting started&mdash;the first baby step of the video content universe we know today. It helped make the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline a global concern, but it also gave the pipeline company and the private security firm it hired a whole host of new tools to shape the narrative around those protests. At the 10-year mark after Standing Rock, Drilled teams up with High Country News to look at the early days of corporate digital propaganda, how it worked, and how it connects to the massive disinformation efforts we&rsquo;re dealing with today. Reported and written by investigative reporter Alleen Brown, and culled from thousands of never-before-published internal documents from private security firm Tiger Swan, The Propagandist offers a unique window into the world of corporate espionage and what it has to do with the disinformation ecosystem we&rsquo;re still dealing with today.Drilled: The Propagandist begins on August 25th. Pushkin+ subscribers can hear all three episodes early and ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.