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  • 2022-06-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a BP Oil Exec Named Brice Cromwell Blame Biden for High Gas Prices? (en)
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  • In June 2022, as gas prices rose to a record high national average of $4.87, a piece of text ostensibly written by an executive for the oil company BP named Brice Cromwell was widely circulated on social media. The viral post read, in part: This post did not originate with a BP oil executive named Brice Cromwell. In fact, BP's leadership team does not include anyone by this name and as far as we can tell this person does not exist. A spokesperson for BP told us via email: We can confirm we do not currently have an employee with that name and this text did not come from BP. So where does this text come from? One common tactic of political propagandists is to attach a seemingly credible or authoritative person (in this case a BP Oil Executive named Brice Cromwell) to a piece of text in order to give the opinion in that text the appearance of legitimacy. This deceptive strategy is often used in misattributed Facebook post (in October 2021, for example, a quote about guns was falsely attributed to actor Clint Eastwood), as well as doctored images of T-shirts bearing political messages. The Brice Cromwell commentary can be traced back to March 2022 when it was circulated in anti-Biden Facebook groups, such as Stop Joe Biden. At the time, the post did not carry any specific attribution. Rather, it simply started with the words PERFECTLY SAID and then the claim that it was written by a person who had been in oil and gas for a decade. A few months later, in June 2022, the post was recirculated along with the claim that it was written a BP oil executive named Brice Cromwell. The members of BP's leadership team can be viewed on the corporate website. This list does not include anyone by the name of Cromwell. It's worth noting that Bernard Looney, the actual CEO of BP, did not blame Biden (or any other politician) for high gas prices. Rather, Looney told Reuters in May 2022 that the sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine removed Russian crude from the system and caused prices to rise. There is one million barrels a day of Russian crude off the system today... We think that will probably double this month, when existing sanctions come into effect ... I don't think we expect there will be any let off on these prices anytime soon. In addition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions, the ending of lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic has also caused higher demand (and thus higher prices) for gas. The Washington Post reported: (en)
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