Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty – “Now it’s just a cesspool of trolls and bots”

By Michael Hiltzik
25 August 2023

(Los Angeles Times) – In the first couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Hotez, an expert in vaccines and tropical medicine at Baylor University, found Twitter to be “a useful and at times almost essential tool for timely and important exchange of information.”

The platform banned the most aggressive anti-vaccine and anti-science trolls, leaving a relatively safe space “for mainstream physicians, epidemiologists, and biomedical scientists to share their unpublished findings” or make others aware of recent postings on professional sites.

After Elon Musk acquired the site in October 2022, he reopened its gates to trolls trying to counteract sound science with misinformation and outright lies and attacking responsible researchers with harassment and death threats. (He has also rebranded the site as “X”, for no discernible reason.)

“Now it’s just a cesspool of trolls and bots” dispensing hate, Hotez says. He no longer allows users to post replies to his tweets because of the trolls’ torrent of “death threats and fascination with Nazi and other hate symbols.” And he has reduced all his activities online.

Hotez is not alone in mourning the disintegration of this once-indispensable social media platform. Scientists are abandoning X in droves, according to a recent survey by Nature. Of the survey respondents, “more than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether.”

Are we just making room for a massive echo chamber that can spread misinformation in a way that is very harmful to society?

Timothy Caulfield, law scholar and science communicator at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada

The survey attributed the decline in usage to Musk’s “largely unpopular changes to Twitter, including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favor of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; [and] limiting the number of tweets users can see.”

And it was conducted before Musk said the platform would eliminate the ability to block harassers.

Concerns about the decline of X as a source of reliable information extends beyond the scientific and academic communities. During the apparent coup attempt in Russia in June, journalists noticed its relative uselessness at helping them find real-time, breaking information from the ground and sifting fact from fakery, due in part to Musk’s trashing of its account verification system.

Public safety officials such as weather forecasters and emergency managers have expressed fears that the site’s deterioration will interfere with their efforts to disseminate urgent messages to residents of a crisis zone and inundate them instead with dangerous misinformation from unverified but seemingly genuine accounts.

Sure enough, during the Maui fires, X quickly became filled with conspiracy theories about the disaster’s cause. [more]

Column: Scientists used to love Twitter. Thanks to Elon Musk, they’re giving up on it

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

By Myriam Vidal Valero
16 August 2023

(Nature) – Emilia Jarochowska joined Twitter in 2016 in the hope that it might help to enhance her career. She was finishing her PhD in palaeontology at the time, and felt that the platform would help her to connect with colleagues and find job opportunities. But that was, she says, before the platform became a “sea of bad trolls”.

Last December, after much consideration and several experiences of fighting misinformation on climate change and COVID-19, Jarochowska closed her account, feeling that her reputation could be at risk if she kept using the platform. She felt that Twitter was promoting provocative discourse over facts and encouraging a type of controversy that “is not what scientists should be associated with”, she says.

A survey conducted by Nature suggests that Jarochowska, now at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is far from alone in curtailing her use of the platform. Since entrepreneur Elon Musk took control in October 2022, he has made a series of largely unpopular changes to Twitter, including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favour of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; limiting the number of tweets users can see; and abruptly changing the platform’s name and familiar logo to simply ‘X’. His management has left scientists reconsidering the value of X, and many seem to be leaving.

To get a better sense of how researchers are currently interacting with the site formerly known as Twitter, Nature reached out to more than 170,000 scientists who were, or still are, users; nearly 9,200 responded. More than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. Roughly 46% have joined other social-media platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok. […]

A lot of experts and specialists are leaving the platform, says Timothy Caulfield, a law scholar and science communicator at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “If that happens, are we just making room for a massive echo chamber that can spread misinformation in a way that is very harmful to society?” [more]

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