News JVTech You pollute 7 times less by watching a video on YouTube rather than on TikTok
Published on 12/31/2024 at 7:15 p.m.
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Every click, every like and every content consumed online increases our carbon footprint.
Likes and videos pollute
Who could have imagined that our social media browsing habits had such a direct impact on our planet? A recent study of Greenly has just revealed the scale of the carbon footprint generated by each click, each like and each video shared. Behind this alarming observation lies a complex reality: the massive energy consumption of data centers and servers, fueled by our digital activities.
Faced with this environmental challenge, Tech giants, like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), are forced to review their business models. The group led by Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has embarked on an ambitious energy transition process, considerably reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.. But the company is far from being the only one to act. TikTok, the world’s most popular social network, also announced ambitious goals to reduce its carbon footprint.
TikTok: the ugly duckling
However, despite these initiatives, TikTok turns out to be one of the biggest digital polluters. Its economic model, based on the massive consumption of videos, results in considerable energy consumption. Every minute spent on the app is equivalent to several kilometers traveled by plane. To give you some figures, TikTok emits 4.93 g of CO2 equivalent per minute of use, which is 7.4 times more than YouTube.
Photo credit: Solen Feyissa (Unsplash)
To try to remedy this situation, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, opened a data center in Norway, running entirely on renewable energy. This infrastructure is intended to be an example for future data centers, highlighting the importance of high energy efficiency and the possibility of reusing heat, which decreases total energy consumption. However, even with this progress, TikTok lags behind other big tech companies in transparency around its climate goals.
Well, and it’s a tiny green dot in a huge red field, but the situation is slightly different in France. Thanks to a more favorable energy mix, the carbon footprint of social networks is lower here than in the United States or the United Kingdom.
