Climate Change Information Seeking through Social Networking Sites and Egyptian’s Public Attitudes towards COP27

Recently, the importance and impact of social networking sites has increased, and a great controversy erupted about the role of these sites in spreading misinformation about climate change. Rather, international organizations active in the field of environmental protection accused these sites of contributing to misleading public opinion about the reality of climate change and its negative effects.
As Egypt prepares to host the World Climate Summit in its twenty-seventh session, in November 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh (the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP27).
This research aims to reveal the relationship between the Egyptian public's seeking of information about climate changes from social networking sites and the strategies used in that, and the extent of their awareness of the seriousness of these changes, and to identify their attitudes towards Egypt's hosting of the Climate Summit (COP27) in November 2022.
The researcher relied on the information seeking theory and an electronic survey was applied as a tool for collecting data from a sample of the Egyptian public, in the age group of 18 years and over, during the period from March 10 to June 10, 2022. The number of forms was 400.
The most important results showed that social networking sites are the first source for respondents to seek information about climate changes, and the reasons came for their speed in disseminating information and the weakness of traditional media in covering news related to climate changes. The respondents’ feeling of the dangers that could be caused by climate change and Egypt’s hosting of the Climate Summit in November 2022 were the most important motives that motivate them to follow this news, and a large percentage of the respondents confirmed that Egypt is qualified to host that event.
The respondents also made many suggestions to activate the role of social networking sites in increasing environmental awareness, including: supporting and updating websites, pages of the Ministry of Environment, encouraging civil society initiatives in the face of climate changes through social media, following up on what is published about climate changes on social media, and correcting the misleading information.