The most polluting websites

Greetings dear friends.

Perhaps when we are in the comfort of our home watching a movie or series through online video platforms or just having some leisure time checking social networks, it does not occur to us to think that we are contributing to the pollution of the planet, but in fact it is so.

Web pages with high traffic consume a lot of electricity. Source: Own design with public domain images from pxhere.com and piqsels.com.

A report by the WebSiteToolTester portal states that video platforms such as Netflix and Youtube, platforms such as Google and social networks such as Twitter are major sources of CO₂ emissions as a result of their activity.

According to this report, more than 200 home pages of the most prominent websites were reviewed, and points out that pollution is due to the large amount of electricity consumed by the servers that use these portals; every time a user selects a news or video or clicks on a tab is asking the server to perform an action, so it must manage and return the data that meet the user's selection, and the more content the platform handles, the more electricity the server consumes in the management of such data, leaving a larger carbon footprint.

According to the report, the most polluting platform is Youtube, which generates approximately 702,000 tons of CO₂ per year, followed by Google with a little more than 267,000 tons per year, which despite being one of the cleanest technology companies, the number of users that use its services is simply too large. On the other hand, among the social networks Twitter leads the ranking with more than 58,000 tons per year, while Amazon.com, the online shopping giant, is the leader in its e-commerce segment with more than 93,000 tons of CO₂ per year. We can also observe that in the video platforms segment, Netflix produces almost 25,000 tons of CO₂ per year, ranking among adult entertainment platforms such as Xvideos and PornHub.com.

Some of the worst websites by annual CO₂ emissions. Source: graph prepared with data taken from WebSiteToolTester.

This is a somewhat difficult situation to reverse since we know that currently many sectors of the economy and entertainment are based on the use of digital platforms, some of the actions contemplated to mitigate the problem is the optimization of resources, such as reducing the weight of images and videos, or also simplify the codes of the pages to make them easier to download and navigate, because the heavier the page the more resources the server will consume; to these I would add that the facilities where the servers of these platforms are hosted are asked to use electricity derived from renewable sources to seek their carbon neutrality.

As users maybe there is not much we can do, since nowadays our work, commerce, leisure or even personal relationships depend on digital platforms, but I think we can contribute by trying to choose before the content we want to visit, in order to review as few pages as possible, and please, watch less porn hahaha.

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Thanks for coming by to read friends, I hope you liked the information. See you next time.

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