How AI and social media can influence how we feel about climate change

Emotions set humans apart from the increasingly human-like AI and robots we’ve created, perhaps a reassuring thought as development accelerates. However, AI and digital social networks still influence our emotions, impacting how we tackle one of the defining issues of our time: climate change. New research explores how these technologies may affect our emotions, perceptions and actions on this climate change.

The perspective piece, published in npj Climate Action, highlights that AI-driven recommender systems, generative AI, and social bots play a growing role in shaping emotional responses to climate issues. Social media, powered by AI, rapidly spreads climate-related information, such as news about extreme weather events, leading to heightened collective emotions like fear, anger, and hope. This can spur action, such as protests and policy advocacy, but can also lead to polarisation and misinformation or reinforce climate denial, according to the team behind the study, which includes several Beijer Institute researchers.

Amplifying emotions with AI

“Emotions shape everything from public support for climate policies to individual actions like reducing carbon footprints or support to climate policies” says lead author Victor Galaz, programme director at the Beijer Institute and associate professor at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

Feelings do not develop in isolation, they are shaped by social interactions and cultural norms, embedded in a changing socio-technological context. For example, social media has altered the scale and nature of social networks allowing emotions and the behaviours they induce to spread rapidly in large social groups.

“With AI infused in digital social networks, these emotions can now be amplified or manipulated at an unprecedented scale.” Victor Galaz adds.

Moreover, AI-powered tools, such as recommender systems and social bots, amplify emotionally charged content, potentially reinforcing biases or fuelling misinformation. Generative AI (GenAI) adds another layer by creating personalised and emotionally engaging synthetic content, raising concerns about emotional manipulation and the ethical implications.

Research frontiers

The authors call for further research into the long-term psychological and social effects of AI-driven climate emotions, identifying three key areas:

First, there is a need to further explore if and how emotions induced or amplified by digital media translates into climate strategies and actions, and how long these behavioural effects last.

Second, there is an urgent need to advance new methods and multidisciplinary approaches to unpack the complex connections between emotions and behaviour mediated by AI technologies, as algorithmic effects are far from straightforward to isolate.

Third, any attempt to leverage emotional AI technologies to support climate action must carefully consider their complex legal and ethical implications, as it could be seen as a form of psychological manipulation, particularly if individuals are not aware of the technology’s use.

“Seeing that the technologies capable of affecting our emotions are developing rapidly, we hope that this overview offers new entry points into why this is both an important and urgent undertaking, as well as identifying new, unexplored research areas,” concludes co-author Therese Lindahl, Beijer Institute programme director.

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Reference: Galaz, V., H. Metzler, C. Schill, T. Lindahl, S. Daume, A. Marklund, A.J. Castro, J. Bard, T. McPhearson, D. Galafassi, and H. Peters. . 2025. Artificial intelligence, digital social networks, and climate emotions. npj Clim. Action 4, 23.