Social media is a really important means of spreading climate misinformation. I’ve been trying, in a small way, to spread *good* climate information on TikTok for about a year now, and I’ve learned a few things about how the platform works.

Getting views

The views on my videos have gone from a few hundred views to a few thousand, so not super viral or anything, but certainly worth doing. It’s a really dynamic environment: the vast majority of views are decided solely by algorithm, and the algorithm is constantly changing. Here are a few tips if you want to get more views:

Having interesting, engaging content is absolutely key, as simply collecting followers doesn’t seem to ensure views (even for big accounts). Sometimes stuff you think is going to fly does nothing.

The first two seconds of a video seem to be critical for hooking people in to a video. Having something interesting happen, or an arresting visual at the start really helps. Also the algorithm seems to reward videos that keep people watching all the way through.

Engagement is key – if people are liking a video, and particularly if they are commenting, a video will keep getting views. This is a double edged sword for climate related content, as the recommendation algorithm seems to push it to people it knows will comment negatively, so you get a lot of negative comments and straight-up climate denial.

A video will get most of its views in the first 24 hours.

It seems that sometimes, something gets chosen to go big – seemingly randomly.

As a platform for climate scientists, TikTok has a lot of potential but the “hassle barrier” of posting content is much higher than for something like Twitter. A basic video of a talking head (like I post) can take a few seconds to maybe a few hours to make. The really big creators must spend a lot of time – particularly in editing. Having said that, TikTok has a bunch of tools that make basic editing very simple, and so simple content is fairly easy to produce.

Denial and doomism

Standard denial and dismissal of climate science has been pretty prevalent on the platform, and interestingly, doomism has been big too. I’m not sure if this is unique to TikTok, or if it’s a pattern repeated on other platforms. Earlier this year, perhaps in response to what has been going on at Twitter, TikTok brought in a policy of removing harmful climate misinformation. I pointed out pretty much immediately (here, and here) that there was still a lot of climate misinformation on the platform. That post was spotted by climate misinformation journalist Marco Silva at the BBC, and he contacted me to tell me about an investigation that he and his team were conducting, to track climate misinformation on the platform, and see how effective the policy was.

Marco and his team reported a good number of climate denial videos and went back later to check if the’d been removed. A high proportion hadn’t. I was interviewed for the piece, and Marco wrote about it here. Part of the interview was aired on BBC Click as well. It’ll be interesting to check back in over time, and see if TikTok’s policy is being adhered to more tightly.

My thoughts on how to tackle climate misinformation on social media platforms are still evolving, and probably worth a longer post. My personal approach is to try and get as much “good” climate information out as possible, but I think that it’ll need a broader societal conversation about how social media algorithms work, and how transparent they are.