Scientific Twitter is slowly disappearing

It was learned that the majority of American Twitter users spend less time on the platform after the company was sold to Elon Musk earlier this year. Scientists are among them. According to a survey of thousands of scientists by the journal Nature, more than half have reduced or completely stopped the time spent on the social network. Nearly half of those surveyed also said they switched to alternative sources like Mastodon.

• 9,200 researchers who participated in the survey more than half say they have reduced their use of the site.
• Almost 7% no longer use.
• About 46 percent said they have created an account on at least one new platform.
• Mastodon, which has seen a significant increase since the announcement of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, became the most used (almost 47%).
• In second and third place are LinkedIn and Instagram, which have 35 and 28 percent of users, respectively.
• Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads placed fourth, despite the app launching just days before Nature conducted the poll. 25% of scientists mentioned it.
• There is even Bluesky on this list, which has not yet been officially released and is in test mode. It is currently used by 6% of scientists and ranks seventh.

As Nature notes, Twitter has historically been an important platform for researchers and scientists. Firstly, it was possible to find the pages of scientists there and use them as a reliable source of information. Second, the service’s large audience contributed to the scholarly debate. Third, Twitter was used to publicize research, because few people are interested in reading online scientific journals that publish long articles in very boring, bureaucratic language with lots of graphs, calculations, and figures.

But now a lot has changed. Users now feel silenced on a platform that prioritizes content from paid verified pages, breaks lots of rules, does not take action against hate speech and harassment, and more. In addition, The company has made its API so expensive for researchers that many no longer have access to it.

While not all researchers who spoke to Nature were ready to completely abandon Twitter, the company’s tactics seem to have alienated a significant portion of the scientific community. And this is probably just the beginning.