People stopped posting about climate change when Covid arrived

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-09-09 04:00

New Zealand; International

Photo by Kate Trifo on Unsplash

The Covid-19 pandemic led to a dramatic fall in social media chatter about climate change, new research shows. Looking at Facebook link shares in the US, the researchers saw an 80% drop in climate change content as the virus started to circulate globally in March 2020. However interest in climate briefly rebounded with a period of record-setting wildfires and droughts in the US later that year. The researchers say it's important to communicate the interconnectedness of climate change and global shocks like pandemics, to avoid society being continually distracted from taking action on climate change.

Journal/
conference: PLOS One

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Victoria University of Wellington, Scie.nz, NZ, Harvard University, US, Facebook Inc, US

Funder: The funders (Facebook & Scie.nz) provided support in the form of salaries for authors (BS & YL) but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of all authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section Competing interests: Yuwei Liu is a data scientist for Facebook and Bogdan State is a former employee of Facebook who currently works for Scie.nz. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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