Shaping the climate debate on social media

Most people spend significant amounts of time on social media – on average, a whopping 2 hours and 23 minutes per day. All the tweets, posts, news and trends that we are exposed to profoundly shape how we think about the climate crisis and other important issues.

In fact, many people learn about these topics first and foremost on social media, so it’s a crucial medium for sharing and discussing our views on the climate crisis with other people, while at the same time shaping the overall climate debate. After all, our posts can reach millions of people.  

So, you can harness the power of social media to carry your views, perspective and insights from this course into the wider debate. And the more people hear and learn about these crucial issues – particularly those parts of the story that we don’t often hear – the more likely they are to be inspired to engage with these issues, too.

Climate misinformation and anti-science movements are prevalent on social media. They are driving increasing polarisation around climate issues and opposition to climate action. It is therefore particularly important that well-informed perspectives are shared on social media, such as:

• critical perspectives about how we got into this situation,
• positive perspectives about how we can get out of it,
• the positive future we can create instead.

Now it’s your turn

Let’s imagine you want to create a social media post about your perspectives on the climate crisis. Don’t worry: here you’re only going to create a hypothetical post that you could share on social media if you want to. Whether you actually share your post on social media afterwards is completely up to you.

A good starting point is to write about something you care about, something that inspires you or something that could inspire others to take action. You could share your perspectives on:

• the climate crisis,
• how we got into this situation,
• why we need to take action,
• what needs to happen,
• what motivates you to engage with the issue,
• how the climate crisis is affecting your hometown,
• any other climate-related story you would like to share.

Aim to write 100–150 words and share it in the Comments section below. We encourage you to engage with other learners’ posts as if you were commenting on a real social media feed.

You can find an example post Our future is still in our hands in the Downloads section for inspiration.