Greenly, a specialist in measuring the carbon footprint of companies, has investigated the Twitter case. The social network, which hasn’t stopped making headlines since it was acquired by Elon Musk, would emit the carbon equivalent of 4,685 flights between Paris and New York per year, or around 8,500 tons of CO2e.
A calculation based on 867 million tweets sent per day and an average emission of 0.26 g CO2e per tweet (internal statistics confirmed by several climate experts). The energy consumption of the device used to create the tweet, the storage and replication of the message in the platform’s data centers, its distribution over the networks or the processing of server requests for display are taken into account.
Main source of pollution: The energy consumption of Twitter’s data centers installed in countries where the energy mix is still largely dependent on fossil fuels.
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Barack Obama before Elon Musk
Of course, not all Tweetos have the same carbon footprint. It is those who enjoy the largest communities of subscribers (followers) who are the biggest polluters. And with good reason: as soon as they tweet, their messages end up in the streams of as many users as possible.
Greenly had fun creating a top 10 of the biggest polluters on the platform. We find on the podium Barack Obama (133 million subscribers and 3.2 tons of CO2e per year), Elon Musk (118 million subscribers and 2.8 tons of CO2e) and Justin Bieber (113 million subscribers and 2.7 tons of CO2e). Follow artists like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Lady Gaga or soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo.
A little background: the 3.2 tons of CO2 equivalent that Barack Obama generates is equivalent to 1.8 Paris-New York round trips. Needless to say, all of these personalities emit far more CO2e every year through countless actions other than their social media posts, as their lifestyles can be harmful to the environment. Still, the Twitter activity of these ten accounts accounts for 22.5 tons of CO2e per year, or 0.26% of the platform’s total emissions.
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And Tommy Catherine, an expert at the Greenly-founded Carbon Institute, specified: “Twitter’s carbon emissions are likely to skyrocket,” referring to Elon Musk’s super app project and his desire to capture the photos-and-videos-related one Significantly increase traffic referred. Unless, of course, Twitter’s increase in load coincides with a major decarbonization of the energy consumed by its data centers. A point where the platform has the edge, which so far only uses 10% renewable energy.
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