In a study sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented users, nearly 47.5% became inactive on Twitter (recently renamed X) after it was sold in October 2022. Given Twitter’s importance for public communication, the findings have troubling implications for digital environmental information sharing and public mobilization.
Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, researchers and industry scientists have raised alarms about the platform’s integrity.
Days after the acquisition was finalized on October 28, 2022, industry analysts reported that over one million users were no longer active on the platform, a doubling of the previous baseline.
Rising abuse and hate speech on the platform due to Musk’s decision to change content moderation could have driven this change.
Recent findings suggest that hate speech increased substantially after the Twitter sale and that engagement increased much more markedly for contentious right-wing actors than a comparison sample.
Changes to the application programming interface and service outages have impeded volunteer and researcher access to real-time Twitter data with real-world consequences. For instance, these changes posed major hurdles to crowd-sourcing information during the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
The platform’s modified governance resulted in overdue payments to cloud services vendors such as Google Cloud, accompanied by throttling user access to posts, negatively impacting user experience and information sharing.
Changes since Twitter’s acquisition likely have ripple effects for other user segments, such as the climate policy sphere, or future disaster response after extreme weather events.
“Twitter has been the dominant social media platform for diverse environmental interests to communicate and organize around advocacy goals, exchange ideas and research, and new opportunities for collaboration,” said Pomona College researcher Charlotte Chang and colleagues.
“As a result, Twitter has been…
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