Greenly, a specialist in measuring the carbon footprint of companies, looked into the case of Twitter. The social network – which has not stopped making headlines since its takeover by Elon Musk – would emit the CO2 equivalent of 4,685 flights between Paris and New York each year, or around 8,500 tonnes 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 statistics confirmed by several 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 via the networks or the processing of server requests for display are taken into account.
Main source of pollution: the energy consumed by Twitter’s datacenters installed in countries where the energy mix is still largely dependent on fossil fuels.
Barack Obama devant 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 for good reason, as soon as they tweet, their messages are propelled onto the streams of as many users as possible.
Greenly had fun generating 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 such as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, or the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
A little background, however, the 3.2 tons of CO2 equivalent generated by Barack Obama represent 1.8 Paris-New York return trips. Needless to say, all these personalities emit far more CO2e each year through countless actions other than their posts on social networks, as their lifestyle can be polluting. Still, 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 likely to skyrocket”, referring to Elon Musk’s super-app project and his desire to significantly increase traffic related to photos and videos. Unless the rise in load of Twitter is done in parallel with a strong decarbonization of the energy used by its datacenters. A point on which the platform has the margin, it which uses to date only 10% of renewable energies.