The Science (®)! JP: ‘Climate change is leading to more social media use, as the increase in extreme weather events forces people indoors’

Climate change is leading to more social media use, as the increase in extreme weather events forces people indoors https://t.co/gLivpaKmNV

— Bloomberg (@business) February 17, 2025

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-17/posting-through-it-climate-change-is-fueling-social-media-use

Bloomberg: Posting Through It: Climate Change Is Fueling Social Media Use
February 17, 2025, By Drake Bennett

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The list of climate change’s effects is long and Biblical: rising, acidifying oceans; fiercer forest fires and thunderstorms and hurricanes; spreading mosquitos and mosquito-borne diseases. But there’s a new potential plague, at least for our species. Climate change might make us spend more time on social media.

In a new study in Psychological Science, researchers found that extreme weather — hot and cold — led to a significant uptick in how much people posted on Facebook and Twitter. Heavy precipitation did the same.

(Worse Weather Amplifies Social Media Activity – Psychological Science- Published February 4, 2025

Nick Obradovich, a computational behavioral scientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is one of the authors of the paper. He concedes that it’s a pretty intuitive finding: When it’s unpleasant outside, people stay inside, and when they’re inside they’re more likely to be scrolling and, perhaps, posting.

[Climate Depot Note: The coauthor of this new paper (Nick Obradovich) also coauthored this 2018 paper in PNAS: Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change ]

The point of the research, he says, was to see if something we thought was likely to be true was, in fact, true, and to flesh out a broader portrait of what does and doesn’t shape people’s online behavior. A lot of science is like that.

“Nobody has measured this before, to my knowledge,” Obradovich says. “We have one of the largest corpuses of social media data that I’m aware of, and nobody has asked this question or measured it before.” (More on Obradovich here:)

A sizable body of evidence links climate change to extreme weather of all kinds. Not just hot weather, but very wet weather. (There’s also some evidence that rising temperatures paradoxically cause brutal cold snaps, by destabilizing the winds of the polar vortex and thereby releasing Arctic air into lower latitudes.)

At the same time, waiting out the weather on our social media feeds probably makes us less happy – there’s evidence on that connection, too.

And social media consumption seems to harden political views and sectarianism for many of its users.

Put this together and a vicious cycle emerges: one in which worse weather drives us to spend more time inside on social media, growing more and more enraged and politically polarized. Our representative government responds to this by also growing more and more polarized and dysfunctional and, therefore, unable to deal with big problems like climate change.

It’s a symbiosis between two of the more pernicious things our species created. Social media wins, so does climate change. Humanity loses.

Bloomberg news: Climate change might make us spend more time on social media. In a new study in Psychological Science, researchers found that extreme weather — hot and cold — led to a significant uptick in how much people posted on Facebook and Twitter. Heavy precipitation did the same.