BUFFALO — A new University at Buffalo-led study suggests greater social media use is linked to emotional distress caused by the perceived threats of climate change.
The study, published Monday in the journal Climatic Change, is based upon a survey of 1,400 U.S. adults conducted in January 2024. Respondents were asked questions about their social media use, emotional response to climate change, support for authoritarian policies and radical action, and demographic background.
The study found:
- A correlation between greater social media use and climate anxiety. This includes climate distress, which is general concern and anxiety about climate change; and climate doom, which is the belief that climate change will lead to the breakdown of social, political and economic systems.
- Climate doom – but not climate distress – is associated with support for radical action such as sabotage, threatening CEOs or hacking fossil fuel cyberinfrastructure.
- Neither climate doom nor climate distress is correlated with support for authoritarian policies, such as population control.
“When we think of climate anxiety or climate doomerism, it tends to be focused on mental health from an individual, psychological viewpoint. That is certainly important to study, but our results point to a collective dimension with implications for climate politics and broader society,” says the study’s corresponding author Holly Jean Buck, PhD, associate professor of environment and sustainability in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.
Buck’s co-authors include Janet Yang, PhD, professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and Prerna Shah, who earned her PhD in communication at UB in 2024 and now is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia.
Yang, an expert in how people perceive risk as related to science, health and environmental topics, says “while social media can promote awareness, its algorithms can foster polarization in risk perception. This study shows a connection between general social media use and climate distress, but further research is needed to specifically examine the type of content that people consume on social media related to climate change.”
The study focused on seven social media platforms: TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Snapchat.
Results show that TikTok and Snapchat were more closely associated with climate doom and support for radical action. Meanwhile, users of Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and TikTok were more likely to voice skepticism, concern about misinformation and distrust around climate change.
The authors say additional research is necessary, especially in how social media platforms are designed, as well as the psychological and societal effects from how their algorithms amplify information. They also cite the need for effective strategies to help people manage climate distress and limit a sense of collective doom around climate change, which could hinder climate action.
Courtesy of the University at Buffalo.
