Pop Culture and Politics

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental Activists, who first became popular with her passion for wanting a solution for climate change. One aspect that made her so popular was her age, as she was only 15 at the time, and her youthful look. People were fascinated about how a young person could care so much about an issue and fear so much for her future and the planet. She has now become one of the most recognisable face in climate change activism, with a large following of young people.

Greta first spike was in July 2019, where her twitter follower count that month recorded 95,199 followers. This came after she addressed the National Assembly in Paris, where she explained that if something is not done now to help cope with climate change by 2030, there will be irreversible damage to our planet. Politicians were quick not to agree with her, as she was a child to them, a looked down her status as being a “celebrity activist” and dubbing her the Justin Bieber of climate change. While this may have been hard for 15 year old to cope with Greta did not stop on her mission.

In September 2019 Greta gains her highest spike of of 1.3 million followers after she sails to New York City on a zero carbon yacht, instead if flying to attend the United Nations Climate conference. This message at the conference was very emotion for Greta as she gave a powerful speech. “You have stolen my dreams and education (…) and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” Greta’s message was clear that she blames world governments for not changing their ways and to only about increased profits. Later in October 2019, she calls this conference a failure as she saw now changes being made. This gave her a steady growth of followers on twitter still, of 268,567 for the month of October.

The next major spike we see for Greta is in December 2019, where she gains 798,230 followers on twitter for the month. This comes after Time magazine names her Person of the Year, which also was a new record set as the youngest ever to be awarded this. It is clear Greta has a been successful at reaching a lot of people with these issues, from classrooms to some of the biggest conferences in the world. She is the face of climate change for a lot of people, and is certainly influential. Encouraging people to buy second hand clothes and to stop fashion and also setting up world wide school strikes for climate action. It is clear Greta has used her platform brilliantly to have people share the same cause as her and understand the severity of climate change.