How See Through News Uses Facebook To Cut Carbon

One climate activist network administers hundreds of community-focused Facebook Groups across four continents. Total membership is 1 million, and some groups’ memberships exceed the local population. How did a global network of volunteer climate activists achieve this with no money, and how is it using this unique reach to measurably reduce carbon?

This article describes how the outreach arm of a global climate activist network exploits Facebook’s free infrastructure to win the trust of, and access to, large groups of ordinary people around the world. Having successfully emulated the function of local newspaper classified ads by linking local businesses and customers, this global, modular, granular reach is about to be leveraged to measurably reduce carbon.

How to get people to change

Want to nudge large numbers of ordinary people into taking a certain action?

Different entities, with different resources and goals, adopt different strategies.

• Global brands pay market research companies to hold structured focus groups, selected to emulate the ‘average consumer’. 

• Political parties commission pollsters to ask small groups, selected in the hope that they represent how a general electorate would vote.

• Activists & NGOs conduct campaigns and appeals, aspiring to convince a small number of people to nudge a large number of people into changing their behaviour.

In 2021, See Through News started developing its own innovative strategy. It combines elements of all three approaches, but at a much bigger scale.

Earning reach and influence without money

After an early supporter donated a proven online methodology, See Through News adapted

this model to serve the See Through Network’s own goal of carbon reduction.

It created a structured, interconnected network of community Facebook groups, moderated by volunteers. 

In three years, the total number of members of these groups is set to pass 1 million. 

There is no indication this growth curve will diminish in the near future.

See Through News’ Facebook methodology has been tested and proven across a wide variety of demographics and cultures, with remarkably similar results:

• The first group created, Salisbury Notice Board, a small city in South West England, now has nearly 42,000 members, equal to its total population.
• Kensington & Chelsea Notice Board, set up in one of London’s wealthiest areas a year or so later, now has a membership of a third of its total population.
• At the other end of England, Berwick-upon-Tweed Notice Board’s twenty-odd thousand members are 75% of the town’s population.
• I Love Morningside, serving a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, with a population of around 15K, has a membership of 240% of the local population (its moderator, incidentally, lives 10,800 kilometres away in Canberra, Australia).
• Enfield (Ireland) Notice Board, a small rural community in County Cork, Ireland, was set up in response to residents mistakenly joining the a group intended for the London suburb of Enfield. Within a couple of years, the Irish version’s membership was 242% of the local population.

The See Through methodology also works in Facebook groups with different scopes and scales:

• I Love Brazil, for fans of the South American country, has nearly 7K members.
• I Love Norway, for those who fancy a bit of Scandi, has 5K members.
• See Through Turks & Caicos has a membership of 0.4% of the Caribbean state’s total population.
• Parkinson’s UK, a support group for patients and carers of the debilitating neurological condition, has more than 2K members.
• Superbalita Cebu Review, a group offering critical analysis of a popular Philippine tabloid newspaper, has more than 11K members.

It also works on other social media platforms. 

• Sibling See Through Together started a YouTube channel in 2024. It used similar strategies to those behind its Facebook success, but adapted them to match Google’s different business model. The results are following a similar trajectory, with 200K views in its first year and growing fast.

How does it work?

The secret to the success of one-off viral videos is notoriously hard to deduce. You can try to retro-engineer what might have pleased the algorithm, but it usually doesn’t work a second time. This suggests random chance plays a big part.

For complex networks, growing over many years, success is not down to luck. This is particularly true when the growth is 100% organic, i.e. not boosted by paying Facebook or Google to promote your content/brand.

For its Facebook groups, See Through’s team of experts analysed how best to exploit the platform’s free infrastructure, business models, and algorithms. They then matched them to what ordinary people want and find useful, and worked out a way to leverage the former to use the latter to achieve their desired outcome. 

In the case of See Through News, the desired outcome was the See Through Network Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. 

See Through News, the network’s outreach/journalistic arm, could also benefit from collaborations with other parts of the network, sharing the same goal but with different focuses:

• See Through Carbon (accurate, free, open-source, transparent carbon reporting)
• See Through Together (video content)
• See Through Games (online games)

All arms operate on zero-budget, using the free infrastructure provided by social media to measurably reduce carbon.  

Free Infrastructure + Volunteers = Eyeballs = Influence

See Through News has no money, but it is rich in the older currency of stories, and the newer currency of eyeballs.

It is structured to barter ‘the best story’ and its social media reach, for carbon reduction, without recourse to the encumbrance of money.

See Through Network seeks to optimise the following assets provided by social media platforms like Facebook:

1. Free: exploit social media’s free infrastructure to mutual benefit. Facebook gets more eyeballs, engagement and data; See Through News earns the attention and trust of large numbers of ordinary people to nudge towards its climate action goal.
2. Predictable: Humans and the Facebook algorithm operate predictably and consistently around the world. The See Through News blueprint has proved equally effective across different cultures, demographies and continents.
3. Scalable: Popular Facebook Groups require disciplined human moderation, following transparent, consistently-applied rules. Scaling requires adding new human moderators as the membership grows. So long as it can recruit enough human volunteers to maintain group quality and defeat the scammers, spammers and trolls that elude Facebook’s robot gatekeepers, it should keep growing.

The result, after a little over three years, is a million ordinary people, in hundreds of groups, across four continents.

All supported by a growing network involving thousands of active contributors, none of whom is paid for their time.

The Man Who Won The Internet Three Times

See Through News’ strategy was based on a proven model donated pro bono by an early supporter, Oliver Swann. 

Swann had known See Through Network founder Robert Stern (AKA SternWriter) since 2012, when he’d noticed a failing crowdfunding campaign on Britain’s best-known natural builder Stern had started filming.

Seeing a flaw in the campaign’s social media approach, Swann contacted Robert out of the blue to offer advice. His intervention came too late to meet the crowdfunding target, but his call had longer-term consequences.

They shared a commitment to persuade, rather than shame, ordinary people into adopting sustainable practices and behaviours, and enjoyed comparing their contrasting strategic approaches. Swann the more analytic, Stern more inclined to busk things.

When Stern told Swann about his early concept for See Through News, one thing lead to another.

I knew Robert’s intentions were admirable,’ says Swann, ‘and that we shared a mutual interest in finding fresh ways to promote sustainability. I respected what Robert was trying to do with See Through News, and saw he needed some help. I initially called to offer some advice, but once I realised the scale of the See Through Network’s ambition, I ended up getting a lot more involved than I’d anticipated. We have different ways of doing things, so didn’t always agree. Robert likes to quote Deng Xiaoping when describing his pragmatic working methods, saying he’s fine with ‘crossing the river by feeling for the stones’. I prefer to thoroughly engineer a bridge, but we got over our differences because we were both aiming to get to the other side, which leads to a sustainable future’.

In the 1990s Swann was a globe-trotting telecoms management and brand consultant, leading the team that created the world’s first mobile phone financial transaction service (a sim-based app) for purchasing cinema tickets. 

After Facebook launched in the early 2000s, Swann exploited its free-to-use model to build a virtual community of people with a shared interest in zero-carbon construction, coining the term ‘natural home’ in the process. Operating almost entirely alone, within 7 years he created a community of over 2,000,000 people.

After returning to his native UK, Swann then applied a similar strategy in reverse, this time using Facebook to create a community linked not by a shared interest, but by a shared geography. Focusing his efforts on rural Cumbria, UK, within 4 years he built a network of local Facebook groups that are about to surpass the total reach of all Cumbrian local TV, radio and news sites combined.

Swann’s donation of IP and training in how to exploit social media for non-financial purposes was critical to building the See Through Network. 

‘Oliver pretends not to like it when I call him ‘The Man Who Won The Internet Three Times’, says Stern, ‘so I won’t. But his generous donation of his IP, and hundreds of hours of boot-camp training in the dark arts of social media, were critical to getting the See Through Network off the ground at a time when no one was convinced our zero-budget model could work – even I wasn’t sure at that stage. In 2021 Facebook had something like three billion monthly users, so we’d assumed there were no unoccupied niches, but Oliver showed us there was plenty of low-hanging fruit still available for climate activists. I don’t know if it’s because the Silicon Valley Overlords who design social media platforms assume everyone else is also solely motivated by money, but it turns out there’s plenty of opportunity for those motivated by things other than money to use Facebook to their advantage at zero cost.’

As a coda, thirteen years after that first call, See Through Together’s volunteer team of award-winning TV editors, producers, camera operators and composers has turned the footage from that failed crowdfunding project into one of See Through Together’s most popular playlists, Ben Law’s Woodland Year.

The See Through Network’s zero-budget model means no one gets paid for anything. Everyone contributes their time and skills pro bono, pays for hard costs like web hosting directly, or donates in kind rather than cash, as described in Our First Donation – Half A Million Dollars Worth Of Supercomputing.

As See Through Carbon’s strapline has it, If you can’t buy integrity, why should you be able to sell it?.

The volunteers

See Through News’s ever-expanding team of volunteer Facebook moderators are essential to build this reach and opportunity to nudge ordinary people into carbon reduction.

The moderators that keep the show on the road were recruited by different means, with different motivations. 

• Many were public-spirited existing group members. They spontaneously offered to help grow a useful online resource that helped their community.
• Some responded to appeals within their local groups for help, as moderating requirements became more demanding.
• Others responded to advertisements in volunteer forums offering FB moderator roles.
• Others first encountered the See Through Network via its other activities and projects, and started moderating as their contribution to the greater goal of carbon reduction.

Whether moderators are primarily motivated by serving their local communities, or by carbon drawdown, does not particularly matter.

Motivations/Outcomes: ‘raising awareness’ vs cutting CO2 

Focusing on outcomes rather than motivation is a key aspect in which See Through News differs from conventional climate activist NGOs. 

All new moderator recruits are given as thorough an induction briefing as they want. This process, which covers what’s explained in this article, eliminates climate deniers, but doesn’t require everyone to be a tree-hugger. Once they’re happy with See Through’s primary carbon drawdown goal, they can moderate and serve their communities – the secondary goal – without having to be ‘climate activists’. It’s up to them.

The See Through Network is not focused on ‘raising awareness’ or ‘education’ per se. On their own they don’t reduce any carbon.  

Most people require some kind of ‘education’ before being moved to take carbon-reducing action. Indeed, that’s the premise of See Through Games interconnected suite of games, The Think Game, The Learn Game & The Act Game.

But by focusing on outcomes, rather than motivations, it’s possible to bypass this stage. 

The stretch goal of See Through Together’s Room From A View playlist, for example, is to induce climate deniers into building sustainable homes because it saves them money, looks better, and is more fun. The protagonist doesn’t ever mention the construction is zero-carbon, only that it saves money. 

If people can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, why obstruct them by mentioning potential trigger words like ‘green’, ‘eco’, ‘sustainable’, or ‘zero-carbon’?

In the same way, See Through News’ Facebook moderators needn’t be motivated by anything other than serving their communities. The outcome – growing See Through’s reach and influence – is the same.

Different courses require different horses. For its YouTube channels, See Through Together has assembled a team of volunteers capable of producing high quality, original video and audio content over a broad spectrum of topics. Many participants are not particularly motivated by carbon reduction, but are very interested in making high-quality, original content with a team of seasoned professionals.

As the Network expands, more people volunteer to administrate it, as well as generate content.

Marie-Elise McCallum, a 23-year-old digital marketing graduate from Melbourne, Australia, took over as See Through News Facebook Manager in early 2025.

A unique global set of petri-dishes

But what’s the point of building up this global reach? 

How does all this social media activity benefit anyone other than further enriching our Silicon Valley Overlords with all the free eyeballs and data they can monetise, while their data centres consume yet more fossil fuels?

It’s for the same reason as our original examples of global brands, political parties, activists and NGOs – to nudge large numbers of ordinary people into taking a certain action. 

In the case of See Through Network, its Goal is Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active. 

Its hundreds of active Facebook Groups, used every day around the world by a million ordinary people, provide See Through Network with a unique asset – an array of petri-dishes to experiment with different ways of nudging the inactive into climate action.

The daily work of the volunteer moderators is to maintain orderly, clean, respectful Groups, focused on the community’s needs. Over time, this creates a trust in the See Through brand, helping grow an audience. Because their engagement with See Through is positive, they may be more amenable to some gentle nudging than – for example – if they were passers-by harangued by ‘eco-activists’ bearing placards and shouting statistics through a megaphone.

Day in, day out, over years, See Through News helps local residents asking for local recommendations for a reliable cleaner, a good meal, or a fun night out. The same groups have also helped local cleaners, restaurants and venues attract local customers.

Their community focus make See Through News-administered Facebook Groups a market researcher’s dream. Instead of having to calculate the profile of a ‘typical’ focus group representing a whole community, See Through News has direct, unique access to the entire community. In some cases, like in Morningside, South Africa, and Enfield, Ireland, more than 100% of it, as they’ve proved so popular neighbouring communities and businesses join to benefit from the Group’s services.

In short, See Through News’ million-strong Facebook Group members provide a perfectly balanced representation of that community’s demographic. What all members have in common is not their social class, political affiliation, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, but:

a) a shared post code

b) positive feeling towards a Facebook group that provides a useful community service

You can buy access to these groups by paying Facebook to ‘boost’ your reach to targeted groups. 

Or you can spend years slowly accumulating community goodwill and trust through diligent, responsible moderation.

See Through Network now has its unique global set of petri-dishes. It has exclusive, unique access to conduct experiments in moving ordinary people from climate inaction to climate action.

How to nudge plumbers and their customers into cutting emissions

So how does the See Through Network propose to leverage its painstakingly-acquired reach, to service its goal of measurably reducing carbon?

Detailed answers can be found in the hundreds of articles on the See Through News  and See Through Carbon websites.

Future articles can be found by subscribing to the See Through News newsletter. Each edition, delivered to your inbox every Sunday, contains links to one article, one video and one podcast episode. As with all See Through projects, See Through does not buy or sell any of your personal data, and it’s free.

Here are a few examples of articles featured in past newsletters, and now available on the See Through News website:

• How To Use Facebook To Measurably Reduce Carbon
• Actions You Can Take Now To Reduce Carbon
• How To Invest In and Profit From An Ecosystem With No Money
• See Through’s 4-Group Climate Activism Taxonomy – How To Win Friends And Reduce Carbon
• The Climate Activist’s Storytelling Jeopardy – Cost/Benefit of Mis-labelling Gifts
• 10 Free Transparent Trojan Gift Horses To Supercharge Sustainability
• Pay Attention: How To Steal Eyeballs To Reduce Carbon

If that demands too much of your time, here are some specific examples.

Hiding in plain sight

See Through News has different categories of Facebook Groups, with different scopes. Most popular are the Notice Board groups that connect local businesses with local customers. Functionally they emulate what local newspaper Classified Ads did pre-Internet.

Following the See Through Network’s ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology, these groups, like See Through Together’s YouTube Playlists, rarely overtly advertise their carbon emissions-cutting objectives.

Instead, they provide people with what they need (community cohesion for the Facebook Groups) or what they want (YouTube entertainment/information).

This ‘hiding in plain sight’ strategy is designed to attract the vast majority of ‘ordinary people who accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change, but who feel powerless to do anything about it’. This is See Through’s definition of its target audience category of ‘Unwilling Inactivists’.

For the same reason, See Through’s brand name doesn’t reference any trigger words like ‘green’, ‘nature’, ‘environment’, ‘eco’, ‘climate’ or ‘carbon’. ‘See Through’ does reference transparency, a core value of the network.

Facebook Group Descriptions contain explanatory links explaining the climate action goal, but almost no one actually reads them. Understandably, they’re in a hurry to find a plumber/advertise their plumbing business.

So how can other parts of the See Through Network leverage See Through News’ Facebook reach to reduce carbon?

Facebook reach to carbon reduction – by the numbers

For ease of calculation, let’s take the dozens of See Through News-administered groups with around 10K members, e.g.:

• Frome Notice Board (SW England)
• I Love Northcliffe (South Africa)
• Conwy Notice Board (Wales)
• Tamworth Notice Board (Australia)
• Blackburn with Darwen Notice Board (NW England)
• Perth & Kinross Notice Board (Scotland)
• Norwich Notice Board (SE England)

Here are two examples of how See Through News can use one of these community group petri-dishes in its 1 million-and-rising reach to measurably reduce carbon.

Example 1: Small Businesses – See Through Carbon 

Objective: to induce a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) to participate in See Through Carbon’s Pilot. This provides free, accurate carbon footprint calculations in exchange for making the data public in an open-source database.

Carbon-reducing outcome: When a participating SME updates its carbon report next year, anyone with internet access can track whether its footprint has increased or decreased. This, is facilitated with free emissions-cutting advice provided by See Through Carbon.

Incentive: Cutting carbon often saves money. The SME’s ‘Scope 2’ consists of indirect energy emissions, and energy prices generally rise. Publicising your carbon reduction also benefits your business in other ways.

• They can prove to their customers, employees, shareholders and families they are cutting emissions.
• They can reduce more of their ‘Scope 3’ emissions (indirect emissions from their supply chain and after they sell their products) by favouring suppliers in the database who have proven they’re cutting emissions. 
• Their big customers, now legally required to accurately report their Scope 3 emissions, will in turn favour SMEs like them, whose carbon reduction is transparently documented in the See Through Carbon database.

Mechanism: 

• On average, around a quarter of See Through News community group members are local businesses. 
• A group of 10,000 would therefore have around 2,500 potential Pilot participants.
• On average, an appealing post has an ‘organic’ reach, i.e. without paying Facebook to boost it, of 1-3K. Very popular posts shared outside the group can be seen by tens of thousands, but again let’s be conservative and take an average of 1,500 viewers.
• As Group Admin, See Through News can pin its own posts to the top of the feed, which increases organic reach. Conservatively, let’s say this might increase the reach of an interesting post to around 3,000, of whom around 750 (25%) will be our target SMEs.
• The post offers those 750 SMEs a limited-issue Golden Ticket chance to win a free carbon footprint calculation via the See Through Carbon Pilot scheme. It will mention that this kind of calculation might cost hundreds of pounds if done by a professional carbon accountant.
• If 1% of the SMEs seeing that post claim that Golden Ticket, that’s 7-8 SME’s per group.

Example 2: Everyone – See Through Together

Objective: to induce individual members to watch a video or podcast created by See Through Together.

Carbon-reducing outcome: The first line of every See Through Together video and podcast includes a URL with an appropriate appeal to click on it. The link lands on a page like Actions You Can Take Now To Reduce Carbon, with a menu of specific carbon-reducing actions. See Through Network can measure the click-through rate at both stages to determine how many people have followed this path, and hence how much carbon may have been reduced as a result (after subtracting the carbon cost of all this online activity).

Incentive: See Through Together offers a wide variety of different types of content, with playlists for popular genres people like to view and share, e.g. 

• Room From A View (property show) 
• Concert in the Key of C (music)
• The 3 Rs (education)
• Ben Law’s Woodland Year (woodland craft and natural building)
• Thinking Outside the Bogs (humour) etc.

Mechanism: 

• A typical post of this kind in a group of 10K might have an organic reach of around 3K.  
• As Group Admin, See Through News pinning a post linking to one of these videos/podcasts to the top of the feed increases organic reach. Conservatively, let’s say to around 6,000.
• If 15% of the people viewing the post are curious enough to click the link to the video/podcast, that 900 additional views. If they like it, they may share it with their friends, but to be conservative, let’s assume not.
• If 5% of the 900 people viewing the video click on the link in the Description (actual numbers vary a lot depending on the type of content, but some Playlists have a click-through rate in double-figures), that’s 45 people.
• If around 10% of those people take action, that’s 4-5 people now measurably reducing carbon.

Why wait so long?

With such a rich resource available, why has the See Through Network taken so long to start to use it?

In part, it was because it needed to develop the other cogs in the mechanism, in parallel. See Through Carbon is a highly ambitious and complex project in its own right, requiring a particular combination of IT, AI, carbon accounting, business and political expertise. 

Finding volunteers with the right skillsets prepared to work pro bono takes time. See Through Together is similarly ambitious and complex, but requires an entirely different set of filmmaking, social media, digital marketing and SEO skills.

Also, for maximum impact, See Through News needed to build up a big and varied enough reach, over different demographics. Now there are hundreds of groups in which to test and measure different strategies. 

Moreover, the bigger the groups are as a percentage of the population, the greater the dependence of the businesses advertising in them, and the greater the leverage See Though News holds in trading advertisements for carbon reduction. Ex-Facebook software engineer volunteers are now coding an ‘AdCount’ tool that will enable moderators to keep an open-source inventory, rationing a certain number of ads per year to each SME in their group, awarding more to those who, for example, participate in See Through Carbon.

And a million is a nice round number.

Hard to tell, easy to show

Congratulations on getting to the end of this article.

It may have been far more information than you wanted or needed, and that’s fine. Complex mechanisms need complex explanations.

Fortunately, none of those million people See Through Network can reach via its Facebook groups need ever know or understand any of this, if they’re not interested.

In truth, most people aren’t that interested in the detail. They’re too busy getting on with their lives to take climate action.

Which is precisely why See Through Network goes to such lengths to Speed Up Carbon Drawdown By Helping the Inactive Become Active.