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| Fig. 1: The login page of the Instagram application (Source: Common Wikimedia) |
In the past years, we observe a significant increase in the number of users of social media networks and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTo, etc. [1-4] Among these applications, Instagram has become popular, specifically between young generations. For example, 60% of Instagram users were younger than 34 in the United States in 2020. [5] The login page of the Instagram application, for instance, is exhibited in Fig. 1. Accordingly, we concentrate on Instagram in this report. Our goal is to answer these questions. How much energy is consumed by Instagram activities? What lessons can we learn from this analysis for the future?
There are various activities and functionalities available on Instagram such as hosting or viewing a live, publishing a photo, publishing a story, scrolling through new feed, etc. In this report, we focus on ''publishing a photo'' as one of the most common activities. There are different factors for energy consumption when an Instagram user publishes a photo on the application in just less than a few seconds. A reasonable way to estimate the energy consumption for posting a photo on Instagram is to use the factor of energy intensity of data transmission on the Internet. This factor; however, could be a function of time, location, data center service types, etc. [6] For the sake of simplicity, we use the general factor of 7.3 kWh/GB proposed in the literature. [7] It means that uploading 1 GB data consumes 7.3 kWh or equivalently 2.628 × 107 J.
The size of a photo uploaded on Instagram depends on the image format as well as image resolution, albeit Instagram uses downscaling techniques to reduce the size of high resolution images. We estimate that the average size of an image uploaded to the application is equal to 512 kB. In this way, the energy consumed for publishing only one photo in Instagram can be estimated as
| E | = | 5.12 × 105 bytes × 2.628 × 10-2 byte-1 | = | 1.346 ×104 J |
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| Fig. 2: Consumed energy by the active Instagram users from 2015 to 2021 only as a result of posting photos to Instagram; the energy intensity of data transmission on the Internet is assumed to be 7.3 kWh/GB in our calculations. [7] (Source: A. Kashefi) |
The number of photos that users publish on the application depends on different parameters. For example, a higher level of number of posts during holidays is observed. Additionally, young people and women tend to post more photos. [8] All in all, we estimate that an Instagram user posts on average 15 photos monthly and thus 180 photos annually. In this way, the average energy consumed by a user due to publishing photos in Instagram during a year is estimated as
| 1.346 × 104 J photo-1 × 180 photos y-1 | = | 2.42 × 106 J y-1 |
The number of active users of Instagram in 2015 was 250 million, in 2016 was 400 million, in 2017 was 580 million, in 2018 was 700 million, in 2019 was 800, in 2020 was 1000 million, and in 2021 was 2000 million, approximately. [5,9,10] Hence, for instance, the total energy consumed by Instagram users because of posting photos on the application in 2021 is estimated as
| 2.0 × 109 users × 2.42 × 106 J y-1 user-1 | = | 4.84 × 1015 J y-1 |
which can be alternatively equivalently reported as 1.34 TWh y-1. In the next step, we use the emission factor of 401 g CO2/kWh as the mix factor of electricity production for the United States to approximate the equivalent gram of CO2 as follows [11]
| 1.34 × 109 kWh y-1 × 0.401 kg CO2 kWh-1 | = | 5.37 × 108 kg CO2 y-1 |
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| Fig. 3: Equivalent grams of CO2 emitted by the active Instagram users from 2015 to 2021 only as a result of posting photos to Instagram; the emission factor of 401 g CO2/kWh as the mix factor of electricity production for the United States is used in our calculations. [11] (Source: A. Kashefi) |
Similarly, we execute the calculations for years from 2015 to 2020, assuming that the only variation is the number of active users of this application. The results of our computations are shown for the energy consumption and the corresponding emitted gram of CO2, respectively, in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. As can be observed in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3, a remarkable increase in the estimation of the energy consumed and the associated CO2 emissions is observed from 2020 to 2021, mainly due to the significant jump in the number of active users of Instagram. A similar trend is recognizable from 2015 to 2020 such that while we estimate the energy consumption due to publishing photos in 2015 as 167 GWh, this number is estimated as 667 GWh in 2020, as can be seen in Fig. 2.
Here we list important concluding remarks and critical messages obtained from our analysis. First, although it might seem at first glance that publishing photos on Instagram is an environmentally friendly activity, we showed that a significant amount of energy is consumed simply by daily posting photos to Instagram. Second, the Instagram users have significantly increased in the past three years and thus if this trend remains enhancing sharply for the next future years, there should be a considerable concern associated with the energy consumption and the corresponding emitted CO2.
© Ali Kashefi The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
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