Mirroring the departing of the colourful blue bird to make way for a gaping black X, huge numbers of environmental users are making their departure from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
A team of researchers at Pomona College, US, tracked the six-month period after Elon Musk took over the website. In this time, nearly half of users who identified as environmentally oriented were no longer active on the website.
Called ‘Environmental Twitter’ by the team of researchers, this group of people were defined as those who post on the topic at least once in a 15-day period.
“We saw that there was a vibrant community engaging in discourse around environmental topics. This then raised the question of how this community may be impacted by changes to Twitter’s governance,” says,“ Charlotte Chang, the lead researcher and an assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis at Pomona.
Chang and her team compared use of the social media platform among 380,000 environmentally interested users to a 458,000-user control group of those who discussed the 2020 US presidential campaign via Twitter.
The drop-off in comparison to these politically active users was significant. Only 20.6% of these users were no longer active on the platform.
It wasn't just environmentalists that were leaving the site. Industry analysts reported that over one million users were no longer active on the platform just a few months after the takeover, a doubling of the previous baseline.
This research builds on previous work by the same team. They examined environmental Twitter, identifying six different personas based on interests in biodiversity conservation, public lands or climate change mitigation.
More than two-thirds of these users interested in environmental issues were considered ‘generalists’ with a broad interest in the field.
The team behind this research raise concerns over the loss of environmentalists. For advocates and researchers, it becomes a threat to the way they analyse and discuss research in a public setting and raise attention to their research.
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the website has seen drastic changes – most recently with its rebranding to X. The X team has also published large amounts of source data, changed rules on verification, and made major changes to the way that news is distributed.
Concerned about the loss of a platform to discuss environmental issues, Chang and the research team are recommending tracking and reporting on what new platforms are attracting support amongst environmental users.
A number of platforms have gained traction since Elon Musk took over Twitter, including Mastodon and Threads – both platforms that Chang and her team include in their recommendations to track.
They are also aiming to raise concerns to X and those in charge of government policy, hoping to keep conversations around environmental issues going.
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