Science, science news, and Twitter: Where are we going? Why scientists are complaining about the disappearing TWITTER social-media landscape

Nature obtained the e-mail addresses of thousands of scientists who were identified through a social-media research project as having tweeted about papers on which they were a corresponding author1. The people were asked if they had changed their use of the social networking site over the last six months. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many people said that they had seen a rise in the amount of fake accounts and hate speech on the platform.

Whether X will manage to regain its attractiveness to scientists, or whether some other social-media platform will grow into its space, is unclear. The scientific enterprise doesn’t see the loss of TWITTER as a fatal blow. She doesn’t believe science has become too dependent on social media. She expects that people will come up with new ideas and that scientists will find it more hard to network and build their careers if they can’t afford to attend conferences.

With this migration has come widespread uncertainty. Many academics worry that the changing social-media landscape is undoing some of the advances that Twitter helped to facilitate in diversity, equity and inclusion for academia.

iga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam mentioned that he was starting to see a lot of strange political far-right accounts in his feed. He has to block them constantly. He said that is has always been not nice, but right now it is a mess.

Researchers have found that, contrary to such public claims from Musk, hate speech increased after he took over2. The group studying the trends could be sued by Musk.

A number of experts and specialists are leaving the platform according to Timothy Caulfield, a law scholar and science communicator at the University of Alberta. Are we just making space for a massive echo chamber that can spread misinformation that is harmful to society, if that happens?

Analyzing the Mastodon crisis: cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty (An update on Meta’s Threads of dissatisfaction)

Although it has been around for some seven years, Mastodon has a much smaller user base than do other social-media platforms. In Nature, the second most popular place for people to start a new account was, in fact, professional networking site, LinkedIn. Meta’s Threads was started a few days before the survey was launched. It reportedly attracted 100 million users in its first five days, and was the fourth-most-popular platform among survey respondents, with about 1,000 people saying that they had joined (See ‘Signs of dissatisfaction’).

Some researchers are trying to stick around. Malek says that, for the time being, he will continue using X to promote his work; he published a paper on land degradation in Asia in July and he’s working on another one about livestock grazing in Europe that he also hopes to promote through X. But a lot of the people that he follows have left and he’s not sure how much longer he will continue.

There is still no consensus on whether X will survive its current chaotic management. In July Musk said that the company is in the red due to its lost ad revenue. The company is accused of not paying its employees their severance benefits in a lawsuit.

Source: Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty

Why Twitter Has Been Done for so Many Years? Environmental Scientists and Scientists Concerned about the Impact of Musk’s Transition on Climate Discourse and Scientific Research

In February, the platform announced it would be ending free access to the platform. The change came into effect at the end of June. Since then, internet research has been hampered or halted due to misinformation on the internet. Costas and Dudek, for example, don’t have free access to new data to further their research on how users engage with science and create communities. They now need to rely on the information from their previous analyses. There are a lot of things that I would like to do.

Costas and He worry that these changes will halt their collaborations with other scientists in the field. Costas thinks that the way academics could access Twitter created a framework for sharing data. Now, someone who pays to access X data will not be able to share it with others to do complementary research or replicate findings unless the other team also pays, he says.

According to a new research, almost half of Environmental Twitter has vanished from the platform. A study published this week in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution states that a wave of environmentally oriented users abandoned the site after Musk took over.

Musk’s leadership could cause a decrease in climate discourse and scientific research on the platform. Environmental researchers and activists used to be able to find out more about the environment through social media.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and water expert with 98,400 followers on X, said that he could no longer remain active in the world. “I’ll only post new material on Mastodon, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms that may develop over time that offer opportunities to communicate and interact with justice, respect, and ethical perspectives now utterly abandoned here,” he says.

After The Verge reached out to X, it responded with an email saying, “We’ll get back to you soon.” The line has been a standard reply for weeks, replacing the poop symbol that was a standard response for months after Musk took over.