If an article is about TikTok and not social media in general, it’s most likely just imperial propaganda.

A Computer Scientist Breaks Down Generative AI’s Hefty Carbon Footprint

2023 article, but way more informative than the TikTok one here, and doesn’t seem like blatant propaganda.

An interesting factoid buried under three layers of stupidity. The gist of it is that watching video uses electricity.

Is the study linked from the article? I fail to find it other than the link to Greenly Website. Feels like the author, Isabel O’Brien, pulled up numbers somewhere else and made the title out of those numbers. The most likely article I found on Greenly is The Hidden Environmental Cost of Social Media where it discusses various sustainability efforts for social media companies, and its method of calculation.

The measurements are only done in the US, UK, and France. In particular, the Guardian’s article cites this data that I do not see from Greenly’s article:

TikTok’s users also have the second-highest emissions per minute of use on social media according to Greenly’s analysis, just after YouTube. One minute on TikTok will burn 2.921 grams of CO2e, on average, while one minute on YouTube will burn 2.923 grams. One minute on Instagram burns 2.912 grams.

Greenly’s article under the heading Comparison of Energy Consumption Across Platforms does cite data from Greenspector’s article (updated the link to 2023 but note Greenly’s article still refers to the link from 2021), using method that does not reflect real-world usage:

• Step 1: launch the application
• Step 2: read news feed without scrolling (30 sec)
• Step 3: News feed scrolls with pauses.
• Step 4: application background (30 sec)

And useless conclusion was drawn:

Users of video-centric platforms like TikTok and Snapchat are responsible for higher energy consumption

The Device Impact: Laptop vs. Mobile subheading has slightly more interesting takeaway:

The device used to access social media can significantly influence the overall emissions, with laptops generally having a much higher carbon footprint compared to mobile devices. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook, which have a larger share of laptop users, contribute more to emissions than mobile-heavy platforms like TikTok, even if the time spent on the platforms is similar. This difference highlights the importance of considering both the platform and the device when assessing the environmental impact of social media usage.

The Aggregate Emissions for Each Country subheading:

However, the data consistently reinforces that the carbon intensity of a country’s energy grid plays a significant role in shaping the overall emissions profile.

Then the article proceeds to talk about per-user usage in each country again drawing useless conclusions about video-intensive platforms producing more carbon footprint.

Lastly under the Data Centers: The Backbone of Social Media and Their Carbon Cost heading, it turned out that data center emissions are orders of magnitude larger than user emissions, and yet the Guardian’s article appears to only focus on per-user emission. In Greenly’s data table, somehow TikTok is always ordered before Instagram despite TikTok having consistently lower annual data center emission than Instagram while every other platforms are in proper sort order.

To see the full emissions per user from both devices and data center, I added the annual user and data center emissions divided by the number of users for each region, then total up US, UK, and France then divided by 3:

The total annual emissions from both user devices and data center combined:

I have lost the plot.

Every headline, ask yourself, why did this headline make the cut? Is TikTok worse for the climate than, idk, cars? Who benefits from this news being published? Who is being punished by it?

Then you start to see how much most news is… well. decide for yourself

I bet a Greece’s numbers don’t include all the Cruise Ships from foreign countries that sail around the Greek islands and spew smoke 24/7…

When I was there earlier this year (in the off season no less), there would be 3-4 massive ships sitting in the port at any given moment.

This seems to he based on a lot of hypothetical and not actual data.

The study examined the carbon footprint associated with each user per minute by incorporating the emissions associated with data centers, which made up about 99% of the footprint, and the emissions associated with charging devices after using the platforms.

TikTok’s emissions are the most opaque of the social media platforms. Tech giants such as Meta and Google release detailed reports to the Carbon Disclosure Project every year, even posting their findings to their respective websites. TikTok has no publicly available emissions data.

It’s just the theoretical output of emissions needed to run a Data Centre based off viewers and average time spent. While these are all rough numbers it could also very well be that the Data Centre’s are powered at least in part by renewables.

So it would make sense that Tiktok would use up a lot of electricity for its platform. We just can’t be sure how much of it actually translates into more emissions.