Pirate's Cove

TikTok used to be a place where idiots could go to be obsessed, outrage, freaking out, etc (I’m not going to search for examples, which I usually find on the front page of Yahoo, because then I’ll be here all day linking Crazy), along with posting their narcissism and dumb stuff. Apparently to amuse people in China who are harvesting people’s information. Now?

Meet the Climate Change Activists of TikTok

When Louis Levanti woke up one morning last September, climate change wasn’t on his mind. “I was never huge into researching climate change, but I was aware that it is real.” So when the 24-year-old TikTok creator, who lives with his parents on Long Island, opened his phone and saw something about a clock being unveiled, he wasn’t initially interested. “I rolled my eyes thinking it had something to do with the stock market.”

The Climate Clock, in Union Square in New York City, counts down how much time we have left to act before climate change is irreversible. Levanti, who normally posts videos with topics like “weird food that celebrities like to eat” or “annoying things people do at the gym,” was distressed, and he immediately decided to make a TikTok video about it. “It’s a problem that can’t be ignored,” he said. “Why not responsibly use my big platform to educate people and wake some people up the way I was?”

In the TikTok video, Levanti, superimposed over an image of Earth on fire, says, “Hey, stop scrolling. Our planet is fucking dying.” It’s gotten over 314,000 views and been shared nearly 14,000 times. There are over 5,000 comments, some of which are heartbreaking: “I am 13, does that mean my future children will suffer.” “It’s sad that younger people have to suffer because of this.”

Well, that’s interesting (nutbaggery), since other cultists claim that all this social media contributes to ‘climate change’.

The world is facing a climate change problem, and climate change is facing a communication problem. The complexities and hypotheticals of climate science do not translate well to an audience who just wants to know whether the dress was blue or white. And yet, on TikTok, one of the world’s most active communication platforms, climate change is a rapidly growing topic. The hashtag #ForClimate has over 533 million views. A video showing a girl singing, “We’re killing the earth and that’s really fun, nobody believes us because we are young,” has over 6.4 million likes. Every day, thousands of mostly Gen Z content creators post videos about climate change and their personal relationship to it. In the span of five minutes, you can get tips on the zero waste movement, watch a teenager cry while looking at starving polar bears, learn about environmental racism, and see scientists working in Antarctica.

Of course, this is mostly being done in a “look at me” manner, attempting to become some sort of “influencer” and get free stuff. The question they should all be asked is “what are you doing in your life other than posting Doomy Scaremongering videos?”

But one of the challenges of having thousands of eager “knowledge brokers” telling their stories about climate change is exactly that: For the sake of good engagement and a good story, they say (and do) whatever they want. Discussion of global warming on TikTok is often simplified to “doom and gloom” commentary, or the misguided idea that at this point there’s nothing we can do to stop climate change, something that Cameron Brick, a professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam, says is actually dangerous. “If you paint it as a terrible tragedy, people either turn away from it or internalize it and feel despair and then disengage.” A study published in 2019 in the journal Frontiers in Communication revealed that dire climate change content can lead to fatalism and inaction.

Of course, doom and gloom is pretty much all the Cult of Climastrology has.

Another result of unvetted climate change information is a misguided focus on individual actions, such as using lower-wattage light bulbs or metal straws. “One of the dangers of this kind of unvetted information is that people can be led into low-impact behaviors that are not going to move the needle enough,” said Brick. Leah Thomas, the creator of Intersectional Environmentalist, disagrees. “There’s too much gatekeeping of activism and what it could look like. Let the kids pop lock and drop it for the planet on TikTok.” She says she’s seen firsthand the impact of bringing attention to climate change. “Awareness leads to empowerment and knowledge, which leads to real action.”

And, of course, the CoC is not happy when people take individual actions, that they practice what they preach, because this isn’t about science, but implementing authoritarian governmental control.