Welcome back! I hope recess week has been going well for you! In today’s post, I will continue to analyze the results from my survey. (Check out my previous post if you haven’t!)
What makes social media so influential? Our brains retain visual information much better than texts and over half of us are “visual learners”. Therefore, it is likely that photos and videos on social media play a huge part in increasing environmental awareness and evoking emotions in us to encourage action. This is evident in Fig. 4, where a large proportion of respondents have felt inspired to do more to for the environment after seeing photos and videos depicting or educating about environmental issues like the one below.
Bird surrounded by trash (source)
Fig. 4 (created using sheets, 42 respondents)
Many respondents also feel that environmental groups/individuals on social media have inspired them. Social media platforms enable individuals and groups to share their opinions and educate others. Personally, I have learnt a lot from environmentalism accounts such as @plasticlitesg on Instagram.
Unfortunately, social media has also been misused for personal gains during environmental crises.
During the Amazon Wildfire and Australian Bushfires, posts like those shown below were spreading like wildfire (pun intended) on Instagram. They claim that for every like or share, some money will be donated to organizations like National Geographic to aid in fire-fighting or restoration.
78.6% of respondents have seen similar posts. Among them, more than 50% have liked and/or shared these posts. (Fig. 5)
Fig. 5
However, most respondents were unsure whether these campaigns were genuine as seen in Fig. 6. Similarly, I was skeptical of these posts but I still liked a few of them because I thought that there would be no harm in doing so, even if they were fake.
Fig. 6
There were a few respondents who believe those posts are genuine. However, many of those campaigns were found to be fake upon contacting the organizations they claim to be working with or failing to provide proof of donation.
When these accounts gain a lot of followers, they can profit off this by repurposing their accounts (e.g. for business) or to get sponsorships. There were even accounts asking for donations and received substantial amounts before being taken down.
I remember scrolling through hashtags like #savetheamazon hoping to learn about the situation and find ways to help but there were so many unrelated posts such as selfies and self-promotion.
If more people take advantage of such crises to gain clout and money, it will distract us from real efforts and undermine the ability of social media to educate us on environmental issues and encourage meaningful action.
Social media also fuels the spread of misinformation and disinformation, this can be very harmful as it will distort our understanding and beliefs about environmental issues. I will be exploring these 2 topics in future posts!
It is worthy to note that there are limitations to my survey. The results are unlikely to be representative of the general population as many of the respondents are BES students and the sample size is small.
bangwenhan September 26, 2020
Hi Siying, Wen Han here! Your post corroborated my thoughts on social media and their influence on its audience. In this 21st century, we are consistently surrounded by both real and fake news floating around the internet. Pertaining to the misuse of social media like Instagram to gain clout and perhaps monetary benefits, do you think if there could be better ways to propagate news on environmentalism through the internet? Do you think the government should enforce more stringent cyber-laws to crack down on these people or organisations exploiting environmental issues for their personal gains?
Si Ying September 26, 2020 — Post Author
Hi Wen Han!
Thank you for reading my post! I think regardless of the platform being used to spread news on environmentalism (social media, online news websites, or any other news outlets on the Internet), misinformation and disinformation are prevalent problems. Social media exacerbates these problems due to its ability to spread information very quickly, so inaccurate/fake news from other news outlets can reach an enormous number of people within a short span of time. However, this is not the fault of social media itself, but rather the users that spread these inaccurate/fake news (both deliberately and unintentionally). Although done unintentionally, we are still partially at fault as we did not take the time to fact-check and ensure the sources are reliable. I think what we can do as social media users, is to be cautious and practice fact-checking of the news we read before spreading them. But to be honest, this is easier said than done as it is often difficult to be sure whether the information is 100% true. I also struggle with this, which is why I decided to blog about this topic, to understand how media influences our views/behavior towards the environment and hopefully become better at identifying whether information is accurate/true (I will be covering this in my next few posts!). I suggest that we should just not spread any information when we are unsure of its reliability/accuracy.
I think this problem of exploiting environmental issues specifically for personal gain is not really common in Singapore so the government may not see the need to implement laws regarding this. However, there have been a lot of social media scams in Singapore and the police have even issued an advisory. So I guess if someone in Singapore was found to be exploiting environmental issues or any other issues for monetary gains on social media they would also be punished. Perhaps the government could implement a law similar to the POFMA, to deter people from exploiting any issue for monetary gains on social media. I think it is more important for social media platforms to implement stricter regulations and take down these accounts trying to scam others. There are even individuals like @exposinginstascams who exposed many of the fake donation campaigns I mentioned in my post, which led to many people reporting the accounts and they were taken down by Instagram.
– Si Ying