The Science (®)! Bloomberg News: ‘Climate change is leading to more social media use, as the increase in extreme weather events forces people indoors’
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.
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.
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: Posting Through It: Climate Change Is Fueling Social Media Use
February 17, 2025, By Drake Bennett
Doom scrolling
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.
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.
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.”
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.
The idea that ‘Climate Change’ leads to more social media use, as the increase in extreme weather events forces people indoors is complete nonsense. People are using social media more in order to find the truth which is carefully hidden by MSM.
If extreme weather increases social media use, why wouldn’t it also increase literacy rates in general since people would also be reading more? As yet, I haven’t heard of any shortages in the works of Shakespeare, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dickens, and the other literary greats. Such weather extremes should also help the education system because if more kids are forced to read, why would the schools need remedial reading classes any more?
Ha ha ha these people are hilarious. They see a way to bring climate change into every situation.
When Bloomberg and others of that ilk offer their audiences a dominant theme, day after day, night after night, of violence, guns and murder, what else do you expect our youngsters to do, but to emulate.
Communicators, as a group, have been Neanderthal in their efforts. How they have wasted the magnificent educational opportunity of the ages by production of trash, propaganda, strange superstitions and beliefs etc.
We are fortunate that at least some good minds see the rubbish for what it is and survive with intellectual integrity instead of numb minds.
Geoff S