Humanity spends an increasing proportion of its time interacting online.
Scholars are intensively investigating the societal drivers and resultant
impacts of this collective shift in our allocation of time and attention. Yet,
the external factors that regularly shape online behavior remain markedly
understudied. Do environmental factors alter rates of online activity? Here we
show that adverse meteorological conditions markedly increase social media use
in the United States. To do so, we employ climate econometric methods alongside
over three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of
individuals from both Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2016. We find that
more extreme temperatures and added precipitation each independently amplify
social media activity. Weather that is adverse on both the temperature and
precipitation dimensions produces markedly larger increases in social media
activity. On average across both platforms, compared to the temperate weather
baseline, days colder than -5{\deg}C with 1.5-2cm of precipitation elevate
social media activity by 35%. This effect is nearly three times the typical
increase in social media activity observed on New Year's Eve in New York City.
We observe meteorological effects on social media participation at both the
aggregate and individual level, even accounting for individual-specific,
temporal, and location-specific potential confounds