• Elon Musk’s decisions since taking over Twitter have many users leaving, including those in the scientific community.
• Nature spoke to several scientists who expressed dissatisfaction with the changes to Twitter and the exodus of users lessening their reach.
• While Musk constantly crows that Twitter is booming and better than ever, users and several reports claim the opposite.

A global town square, an everything app and “the best platform for creators” are just some of the ways that Elon Musk has described X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

However, whether there will be enough users willing to take this experiment for a ride is a question only X can answer. The company, which went private when Musk took over last year, no longer shares how many active users it has. Musk recently said that monthly users had reached a new high in 2023, but this claim featured an unlabelled graph so its accuracy is questionable.

Furthermore, various analysts and reports, such as this one from TechCrunch, highlight that usage of Twitter is down, not because of Musk but likely because, well Twitter isn’t very engaging and has, over the years, become rather ho-hum aside from when drama flares up.

However, results from a study conducted by the journal Nature highlight something that may be a problem for X, scientists are dialling back their use of the platform.

Nature sourced email addresses of 170 000 scientists who had tweeted about papers they were involved in. Of that figure 9 153 responded and they were surveyed by the journal in July. The responses to questions about the change in the use of Twitter are interesting.

As many as 54 percent of respondents said they had slightly, significantly or entirely stopped using Twitter over the last six months. Drilling down in to that, 23.3 percent of respondents said they had decreased their use slightly, 24 percent said their use significantly decreased and 6.7 percent said they’d stopped using Twitter.

What we find most interesting are the respondents who said they had significantly or slightly increased their use of the platform which was only 2.8 percent and 6 percent of respondents respectively.

While 46.1 percent of respondents said they had created accounts on other social media platforms in the last year 53.9 percent said they hadn’t. For those who have created accounts, they were on Mastodon (46.9 percent), LinkedIn (34.8 percent) and Instagram (27.6 percent).

This is a problem most notably for visibility of scientists. Twitter, or rather pre-Musk Twitter was what we’d describe as an open platform. One could access content on the site from anywhere and essentially read tweets, follow conversations through hashtag and more all without needing to even create an account. Most importantly, the conversation that was unfolding was easy to follow because folks were all on Twitter having that conversation.

For Twitter, or X, this means fewer authoritative voices users can trust on its platform. We’re sure catturd2 is fun for some folks, but when breaking news happens or there is a dreaded disease, we’re not sure folks look to meme dealers and contrarians for updates.

By creating division within the Twitter/X community, the town square Musk so desperately wanted has scattered to multiple platforms.

This could make it more difficult for scientists to network, for the public to get exposure to the work scientists do and lower accessibility to the sciences. That sounds like a bold claim to make, but consider how much information can be obtained from a post asking for help. A student that can’t afford access to a study could potentially learn about a “science-hub” so to say where they could access those materials for free with a single tweet, helping them complete their studies.

Worse still, Twitter being useful as a platform to measure public sentiment and conversation is far less useful since its API was locked behind a paywall earlier this year. This effectively kills any sort of research as in order for it to be reviewed, the reviewer also has to pay for API access.

The quality of Twitter has clearly plummeted and that’s easy to see just by scrolling through the website. In a bid to garner ad revenue share, verified accounts are farming engagement with either low effort questions loaded with emojis or purposefully courting controversy.

As we said, whether there will be anybody around to give Musk’s everything app a go remains to be seen but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that many simply aren’t willing to stick around to see that vision come to life.

[Image – ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash]