Greenly, a specialist in measuring corporate carbon footprints, examined the case of Twitter. The social network – which hasn’t stopped making headlines since its acquisition by Elon Musk – would emit the CO2 equivalent of 4,685 flights between Paris and New York every year, or about 8,500 tons of CO2e.
A calculation made on the basis of the 867 million tweets sent per day and on the average figure of 0.26 g of CO2e emitted per tweet (internal data confirmed by various climate experts). The energy consumed by the device used to create the tweet, the storage and replication of the message on the platform’s datacenters, its distribution across networks or the processing of display requests by the server are taken into account.
Main source of pollution: the energy consumed by Twitter data centers installed in countries where the energy mix is still largely dependent on fossil fuels.
Barack Obama in front of Elon Musk
Of course, not all tweets have the same carbon footprint. It is those who enjoy the largest communities of subscribers (followers) who are the biggest polluters. And for good reason, as soon as they tweet, their messages are projected onto the streams of as many users as possible.
Greenly enjoyed generating a top 10 list 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 though, the 3.2 tons of CO2 equivalent generated by Barack Obama represents 1.8 round trips from Paris to New York. It goes without saying that all these personalities emit much more CO2e every year through countless actions other than their posts on social networks, as their lifestyle can be polluting. However, the Twitter activity of these ten accounts represents 22.5 tonnes of CO2e per year, or 0.26% of the platform’s total emissions.
And Tommy Catherine, expert of the Carbon Institute launched by Greenly, to specify: “Twitter’s carbon emissions are in danger of skyrocketing”, referring to Elon Musk’s super-app project and his desire to significantly increase traffic related to photos and videos. Unless Twitter’s increased load happens in parallel with a major decarbonization of the energy used by its datacenters. A point on which the platform has margin, which currently uses only 10% of renewable energies.
