Sustainable Content: A Framework for Advancing Sustainability in Social Media Content Production and Digital Media Resilience

The digital world is significantly contributing to environmental destruction from the production of digital content and the behaviours of producers and consumers. The annual global carbon footprint of the social media platform TikTok alone is already comparable to that of a country like Greece (Shepherd, 2025; O’Brien, 2024). Hence, failing to address the issue now will only worsen our environment rapidly. In this piece, I further problematise this issue by making online influencers accountable for their actions in content production. I introduce the term “sustainable content” to help provide solutions in the field. Sustainable content is a discipline influencers should foster among themselves and later apply when producing social media content. Three types of content that are deemed fun but are actually detrimental to the environment are discussed: mukbang, luxury travel, and livestreaming. Three solutions in the context of sustainable content are also provided by analysing the psychology behind the fame of each content type. The goal of introducing sustainable content to academia is to integrate the digital communications field into global sustainability discussions by highlighting this issue, encouraging researchers to develop the concept further, and motivating influencers to adopt and normalise sustainable practices in their content production.