Role of Social Media in Greta Thunberg's Climate and Sustainability Action

Introduction

Social Media, is comparatively a powerful slogan in our recent society. The phenomenon of social media has begun its operations in the new millennium, when the first social media network called Myspace has attracted a large number of users and enables them to create a bespoke wall, thus facilitating their friends to visit the digital wall. It was also the platform to share the things that the users have in their minds. After the success of the Myspace network, many other similar social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ have come to the scene and are popular today. Social media has helped a lot of different users to communicate their idea and information across the globe within a short period and make the people up-to-date about the happenings. Though the usage of social media is wide-ranging, its common goal is the same. The ultimate objective of each social media is to reach the information to the users (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Thus the role of social media is a tremendous one and it supports all sorts of user segments such as individuals and businesses. Even there are political leaders and activists have been using this social media to propagate their intention and ideology toward the betterment of the society, environment, economy, and country (Bria, 2013). Greta Thunberg is one among those who use this social media to propagate her climate actions and to reach millions of people throughout the world, as it is more effective and powerful. Greta Thunberg is a 19-year Swedish girl who initiated the largest movement called “Fridays for Future”. It is one of the most prevalent social movements in history, as it was initiated by a quite small girl in front of the Swedish Parliament in August 2018. Further a single child potholed in opposition to the adults, a child against the global political system (Jung, Petkanic, Nan, & Kim, 2020). The same has been tweeted immediately and reached hurriedly and this phenomenon received global attention. Thus one single girl in Sweden shortly became six million remonstrate children throughout the world. All these possibilities are because of social media. Thus, social media have played a major part in Greta Thunberg’s climate movements and made her a Global icon single-handedly. However, Greta Thunberg’s efforts cannot be removed from the social media atmosphere in which it placed (Prakoso, Timorria, & Murtyantoro, 2021). Regarding the same Thomas Olesen explained that it is difficult to envisage the iconization relating this way and to this degree with no social media. He also revealed that the smattering of social media features influences the course of the iconization progression. They also diminish the communication cost, highlight visual depiction, maintain intimacy between icon and spectators, consist of a fresh and younger audience, and disseminate communication throughout different media platforms. Through this, Greta Thunberg was capable to attain young minds and direct them towards her climate actions and therefore she could achieve the status that she is today, bearing in mind her feeble starting point and absence of resources, being a girl child and haulage a load of psychological challenges (Olesen, 2022). As a result, Greta Thunberg, the name has familiarised in all households as she initiated omitting school to begin actions against climate change in August 2018, as she was motivated by the Parkland school students in the USA, they started nationwide school strikes to remonstration against the inaction of government on gun violence (Beckett, 2019). She demands political leaders of all the country to follow the conditions of the Paris agreement and, if she has to contain any other demands, these would be to announce a global climate crisis (Vice, 2019). Hence, she initiated the Fridays for Future movement and thereby skipped school and sit in front of the Swedish parliament with a slogan board “skol strejk för klimatet” (“school strike for climate” in Swedish). Though this movement started by her alone, very soon she became familiar with her remarkable actions and stimulated the School Strike meant for the Climate movement (Alter, Haynes, & Worland, 2019).