Jonathan Franzen: online rage is stopping us tackling the climate crisis

In an interview with Extinction Rebellion, the novelist said he found the negative response to his writing about the climate crisis 'surprising, if not disheartening'

Fresh from another internet pile-on over his views on the climate emergency, Jonathan Franzen has warned that hate speech on social media is dividing humanity and preventing the cooperation needed to tackle the environmental crisis.

The American novelist was speaking to the Extinction Rebellion podcast, to be released on Wednesday, about the aggressive online response to his recent New Yorker article about the climate catastrophe. He is not on social media, he said, "so I don't experience the Twitter rage except through the accounts of a couple of friends who have not learned that they shouldn't tell me about these things".