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Description
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Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policymakers or the broader public. Elon Musk’s take-over of the company brought sweeping change to many aspects of the platform, including the public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. In this letter, we take up a narrower empirical question: what did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured with either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, or quote tweets). We further test whether this drop-off in engagement differed by account type, finding that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets or quoting others’ tweets), but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting or replying to others’ content). (2024-04-04)
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