Worse Weather Pushes People to Social Media

New Year’s Eve in New York City. Mardi Gras in New Orleans. These are days when people flock to social media to post their latest escapades. But new research has found that inclement weather, like freezing temperatures or lots of snow, as well as hot weather, can also push people to be more active on social media. 

In a new study published in Psychological Science, researchers investigated how social media use fluctuated with meteorological conditions. The research contributes to the emerging understanding of how environmental conditions can influence behavior in digital social spaces. 

“It’s really surprising to me still that we’ve done a lot of science on, what does social media do? What does social media cause? And what does it influence?” said Nick Obradovich, one of the paper’s authors and a computational behavioral scientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. “But we haven’t done a whole lot of work on what influenced social media use as a first order question.” 

The inspiration for looking at how weather influences social media activity came from Obradovich’s previous research. In a study published in 2018, he found that worse weather seemed to lower the mood of social media posts—people would log on to express their discontent (Baylis et al., 2018). In other studies, he has seen how people engage with social media differently during natural disasters, using it as a resource in times of crisis (Kryvasheyeu et al., 2016).

Related content: Collected research on Weather & Climate Change

“There’s been growing research looking at the way in which meteorological conditions influence behavior,” explained Kelton Minor, the lead author of the new study and an incoming assistant professor of behavioral data science at Columbia University. But when it came to whether people engaged in social media in general, “there was a dearth of evidence about how the environments that we live within and the weather conditions outside influence this really fundamental aspect of modern-day life,” he said.  

For the new study, Minor, Obradovich, and colleagues examined over 3.5 billion Facebook and Twitter (now called X) posts between 2009 and 2016. They wanted to see how the number of posts fluctuated when weather conditions—temperature and precipitation—shifted away from the average associated with the post’s location and time of year. 

“What’s really powerful about this natural experiment is that the timing of weather​ conditions​ is as good as random​ within a given location and time of year​,” Minor said. “So it really allows us to not just infer a correlational relationship or association, but rather to infer a causal effect.” 

When the authors examined the relationship, they found that on both Facebook and Twitter, online behavior of people followed a similar pattern. When temperatures dropped or were hotter than average, social media activity increased, forming a U-shaped curve. For instance, in Boston, social media activity increased 4.5% when temperatures were below freezing, a higher increase than the social spike seen during an event like the Boston Marathon, Minor explained. 

Interestingly, although social media activity increased when it was hot outside, it was particularly amplified when temperatures were low and precipitation high—in other words, when it was cold and snowy. In these cases, social media posting rose above some of the largest social events in the United States, up to three times more activity than New Year’s Eve in New York City. 

“There’s a huge amplification in people being online,” Minor said. “And so this suggests that people are being environmentally nudged to go into this digital space [when the weather is worse].” 

This finding isn’t surprising, said Obradovich, as it makes sense that people are more likely to be inside and on their phones when weather takes a turn. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t significant. Understanding people’s online behavior has implications for broader social and mental health. Social media researchers have been interested in what’s called ​the ​social displacement hypothesis, where our digital social activities displace real life face-to-face interactions with family and friends, which in turn may harm our emotional well-being. This new study suggests that this dynamic may be incredibly sensitive to environmental conditions and weather, something that hasn’t been considered before in behavioral research.  

Minor added that future research could look at longer term shifts in weather and climate, as well as how these changes affect mental health and behavior more broadly. Social media is becoming increasingly ingrained in the daily habits of many people, so it has implications for how we connect with one another and our mental well-being. Understanding this could also help researchers to design potential interventions that respond to weather fluctuations, added Obradovich.  

“What we see here is that these fundamental digital behaviors, even within individuals, are remarkably sensitive to the weather outside,” said Minor. “We need to be mindful of this response and the potential downstream implications for both individuals and society at large.” 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment.

References 

Minor, K., Moro, E., Obradovich, N. (2025). Worse weather amplifies social media activity. Psychological Science, 36(1), 35–54. 

Baylis P., Obradovich N., Kryvasheyeu, Y., Chen, H., Coviello, L., Moro, E., Cebrian, M., Fowler, J. H. (2018). Weather impacts expressed sentiment. PLOS ONE, 13(4), Article e0195750. 

Kryvasheyeu, Y., Chen, H., Obradovich, N., Moro, E., Van Hentenryck, P., Fowler, J., Cebrian, M. (2016). Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity. Science Advances, 2(3), Article e1500779.