A clip of Greta Thunberg laughing when she heard about a Fridays for Future protest has been shared widely online. Now the activist has explained what was behind her reaction.
Greta Thunberg has responded after a clip of her laughing at a climate protest went viral and drew criticism online. The protest in question was organized by Fridays for Future, the very movement she started.
The moment comes from a new documentary by German filmmaker Hubertus Koch, titled “On Tanks Into The Climate Crisis – How Activism Is Criminalised.” In it, the 23-year-old Swedish activist talks about how her approach to activism has changed.
Thunberg launched Fridays for Future in 2018, when she was 15. She started skipping school on Fridays to sit outside the Swedish parliament and demand action on climate change. Her one-person protest soon turned into a global movement, with millions of students around the world joining in.
The clip people are talking about
In the video, Koch tells her he thought it was “kind of symbolic” that they were meeting on the same day as a Fridays for Future demonstration in Berlin. Thunberg cuts in. “Is it?” she asks, and starts to chuckle. “Really? They still do that?”
She then bursts out laughing again and asks for the camera to “cut.”
In an Instagram statement on Friday, Thunberg said the clip had been shared without the political context behind it. “For context, this was the same days as we were blocking a weapons manufacturer there,” she wrote.
She said she had just found out that a police-approved climate demonstration was taking place at the same time, in what she called “a famously white middleclass area,” organized by the same German climate movement that had “cancelled and ‘distanced themselves’ from me for saying that Palestinians are humans too.”
She also accused parts of Germany’s climate movement of failing to confront what she described as the country’s complicity in the destruction in Gaza.
The filmmaker defends Thunberg
Koch has also defended her. In an Instagram video, he said the exchange had been “taken out of context.”
“Greta does a great deal more than just participate in demonstrations – that is, practising civil disobedience, suing states, and so on,” he said, according to the Daily Mail. According to Koch, Thunberg has moved past her Fridays for Future days and now sees organized demonstrations and panel talks as “ineffective.”
“And that’s why she laughs – in the sense of, ‘They’re still doing that,'” he said.
How Thunberg’s activism has developed over the years
Thunberg first became famous as the face of the youth climate movement. In recent years, she has increasingly used her platform to speak about the war in Gaza, which many experts, including a UN commission of inquiry and the world’s largest association of genocide scholars, have described as a genocide. Thunberg has said she sees the two causes as connected, describing the climate crisis as a matter of human rights and justice.
In October 2025, she was detained by Israeli forces after trying to reach Gaza on a flotilla that aimed to deliver humanitarian aid and challenge Israel’s blockade.
In December 2025, she was arrested in London at a protest supporting imprisoned Palestine Action members who were on hunger strike, and in September this year, she backed rapper Macklemore after he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s US tour over pro-Palestinian comments he made on stage.
Read more:
