Mark McCaughrean has moved his home online in stride. McCaughrean, an astronomer at the European Space Agency, has had a Twitter profile for many years. In the spring, when Elon Musk first suggested buying the social media platform used by nearly 240 million people worldwide, many worried that such an acquisition would add to Twitter’s obnoxiousness and allow misinformation to drown out discourse. reasonable – Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist.” and promised to stop censoring accounts. But for McCaughrean, it was beyond that. “At some level, I made a choice that I don’t want to personally support his ecosystem. “
So McCaughrean decided to open a profile on Mastodon, a recent, much smaller Twitter rival. “I just left a username there,” he says. But 2 weeks ago, after Twitter’s sale went through, McCaughrean started using the new platform. “I’ve been much more active there than on Twitter.”
With 16,000 followers, McCaughrean is not a Twitter celebrity, but he is one of countless scientists who have used the platform to connect and debate with colleagues in the same field, as well as scientists from other fields, artists, journalists and generals. public.
Initially dismissed by many as a platform for self-promotion, Twitter in recent years has also provided a venue for hate speech, including abuse directed at scientists. But over time, Twitter has become a major public good, says Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University (@M_B_Petersen, 33,000 followers). “I believe it has played an important role in disseminating knowledge globally and between scientists and the public during, for example, the pandemic.”
However, with uncertainty about how Twitter will change under Musk, many of the thousands of medical and scientific experts on the platform have begun looking for alternatives or are considering quitting social media. For a while, the hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterMigration were trending, and many researchers posted their new Mastodon handles, encouraging others to follow them on the site, which has gained more than 100,000 new users within a few days after Musk completed his purchase.
For now, most researchers are waiting to see what happens with Twitter. “I’m hedging my bets with a Mastodon account, but I don’t plan to quit anytime soon,” says biologist Carl Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom, 163,000 followers) of the University of Washington, Seattle. Many other researchers are doing the same. This means that even if there is little change at the moment, the groundwork is being laid for what could soon become a mass digital migration of scientists.
The bigger fear is that Musk’s Twitter discourse will worsen further. Indeed, as part of Twitter’s mass layoffs today to cut costs, it let go of its curation team, which is primarily responsible for weeding out misinformation on the platform. This, combined with an exodus of experts, means that misinformation can go further unchecked. “I’ve always felt that having expert voices to counter rampant misinformation is important and necessary,” says Boghuma Titanji (@Boghuma), a virologist at Emory University with more than 22,000 Twitter followers.
Others worry that the idea of ”free speech” will go too far. “While I agree with the importance of free speech on social media, I also worry if some of Musk’s rhetoric on this issue is taken by some users as a relaxation of the norms that govern interactions on Twitter,” says Petersen. “We know from research that the norms that govern a social media group have an effect on the level of hostility in the group.”
Indeed, the use of racial slurs on the platform with spikes after Musk took the platform, although he has said the rules haven’t changed. “If it gets too toxic and abusive, I’ll leave to maintain my own well-being and consider other platforms,” says Titanji.
The issue of toxicity on the platform only adds to long-standing concerns about Twitter’s leaders not adequately protecting some groups of people, particularly women and people of color, from harassment and abuse, says Devi Sridhar, a global health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “They rarely acted on reported tweets and there was always abuse and threats on the platform.” Sridhar (@devisridhar, 323,000 followers) says he will see how things develop before deciding to jump ship.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan (@angie_rasmussen, 411,000 followers), has been putting an end to such abuse. But she notes that Twitter helped her land her current job and start some scientific collaborations. “For now, I still find it a useful platform to follow peers and learn as well as share,” she says, adding that she won’t be leaving Twitter as long as the good outweighs the bad. “If people who want to tell me I’m stupid/fat/ugly/old/clean/unlovable/compromised/corrupt/conflicted/incompetent get a license to say whatever they want without restriction or moderation, the cost-benefit analysis would change for me,” she adds.
Many researchers, whose tweets help make the platform worthwhile, also bristle at the idea of users paying a subscription fee to one of the world’s richest individuals. Musk has proposed a paid service that includes the blue check mark that signals a verified account and fewer ads. “That will definitely push me out the door,” says Titanji. “As a matter of principle, I think that social media users are free creators of content for these platforms and access to them should not come at a financial cost to users.”
Some of these challenges could become moot if Twitter simply fails as people leave the platform. And while Twitter may be a public good, it’s never been a good business: The company has had between $1 billion and $5 billion in revenue in recent years, mostly from advertising, but it only turned a profit in 2018 and 2019. Musk’s efforts to make the business profitable again could end up dooming the platform, Bergstrom says. “I think it’s a very real possibility that the whole thing will collapse within a few months to a few years.”
But there’s a cost to leaving Twitter, too, says Casey Fiesler (@cfiesler, 23,000 followers), an information researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied the migration of online communities. Perhaps the biggest practical consideration for many researchers who have built up a large Twitter following is that the decision to move elsewhere means starting from scratch. “Some people have put a tremendous amount of effort into building a Twitter following,” says Fiesler. “If I left, I’m not sure I’d go straight to Mastodon or just use that as a reason to do less social media,” Rasmussen says.
However, online migrations tend to be gradual, says Fiesler. In one of her research projects, a participant described it as “watching a mall slowly go out of business.” But the speed with which academics are flocking to Mastodon has surprised him. “Things are changing faster than I thought even a week ago,” says Fiesler. McCaughrean agrees. “I see that the institutions are now coming together [Mastodon], observatories, institutes”, he says. Right now, many people will maintain a dual presence, Fiesler says—there are already programs that can automatically post to both platforms. For a mass exodus to occur, “there has to be a compelling reason to leave and an immediate viable alternative,” she says.
Even if academic Twitter ends up mostly moving to Mastodon, the big question is whether the general public will also move there, allowing scientists to communicate with more than just each other. “When I tweet, I’m talking to my neighbor and the person at the grocery store and the teenager who’s thinking about studying science in college,” says Fiesler. “That’s the beauty of social media scientists.”
