Managing social media as public infrastructure, for the sake of the climate

When I first began reporting on climate change in earnest — not just as incidental or backdrop, but as the center of my work — I got a bit obsessed with climate storytelling in film, TV, theater and literature, trying to make sense of the stories we tell about climate. Among the dozens of climate fiction (or cli-fi) novels I read at the time, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future quickly emerged as a favorite. Robinson’s doorstop of a tome stood out for the way it tried to paint a picture of what it might look like if we get things right, without resorting to a utopian vision that glosses over the consequences of actions already taken.

The book explores a myriad of potential earth-cooling solutions, from the political to the scientific. But one thing stuck with me more than any other, digging into my brain like a small pebble in a shoe: a short passage imagining a publicly owned social media network.

It might at first seem an odd inclusion in a book focused on how we fix the climate. But if you understand that fixing the climate requires some level of fixing our society and politics, it starts to make sense.

In the U.S., about three quarters of the population uses social media. Nearly half of teens say they’re online “almost constantly.” And more than half of U.S. adults get at least some of their news from social media.

Social media sites have an increasingly outsized influence over how the public understands what’s happening, without any real accountability for the algorithms or tech billionaires that shape them. The implications for our climate are troubling: Recent reports have found that climate misinformation is being supercharged by online bots and trolls from groups trying to discredit viable climate solutions. Meanwhile, a whopping 92% of land and environmental defenders say they’ve faced online abuse, and nearly half of climate scientists who have published more than 10 papers have faced online harassment for their work.

It’s against this backdrop that Robinson tried to imagine an alternative. What if our ability to connect and share information wasn’t controlled by tech oligarchs—what if, instead, that flow of connection and information was built and maintained by the public, for the public?

What if, just as we have public libraries or public transit, we had a public option for social media?

In my latest missive for Atmos, this is the question I dug into, with the help of legendary sci-fi writer Robinson himself. In Robinson’s alternative vision, social media would be “a public amenity owned by the people, which is to say the government,” he said, “and then, if your data were used… and you got a micro royalty every time your data was used, then you might have an income that was not insignificant.” In his imaginary arrangement, data harvesting is voluntary and essentially translates into something like a universal basic income.

But he admitted, when we talked in 2025, that there are holes in this vision he set out in 2020. He recommended I talk to Cory Doctorow, perhaps best known for coining the term “enshittification,” which describes the gradual decline in the quality of online platforms as companies seek to serve advertisers over their users, to discuss it.

So I called him up, too. From Doctorow’s perspective, fixing social media isn’t quite as simple as giving people more control over their data or turning the control over from tech CEOs to government officials. Instead, it could look like public ownership of or investment in the infrastructure that allows a public good to exist, rather than direct government control of it.

Take reading, which many think of as a public good. “There’s a lot of infrastructure of reading that is shouldered by governments at various levels, starting with going to kindergarten and learning your ABCs,” Doctorow told me, also citing public libraries and literacy programs. “All of that stuff that is provided by the state and by various public entities makes reading into a public good that you can more or less take for granted.”

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After talking to Doctorow, I also reached out to Nathaniel Lubin, who has spent much of his recent career working on internet and society issues through fellowships at Harvard and Cornell. Lubin relies on the metaphor of public health to make sense of how we might fix what’s broken about social media. He first started thinking this way in part inspired by twentieth-century environmental figures like Rachel Carson. When rampant use of chemicals was harming ecosystems, animals, and people alike, Carson and the movement she helped spark with her groundbreaking book Silent Spring were able to make the case for action not by focusing on individual harms to one bird or one person, but by demonstrating that unchecked chemical usage was bad for society and ecosystem health as a whole.

Lubin thinks that focusing too much on moderation of individual posts on social media is likewise ineffective at combatting the harms of these platforms. “Most individual posts [on social media] might be acceptable as individual posts, but the aggregate effect of the context in which users experience repeated exposures is actually the effect,” he said. “It’s no longer an individual case; it is a population effect happening in aggregate.”