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.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/17/bloomberg-news-climate-change-is-leading-to-more-social-media-use-as-the-increase-in-extreme-weather-events-forces-people-indoors/
