It's been coming for a long time but, says Nick Bibby, there just aren't enough reasons to stay on Twitter/X any more and there are plenty of reasons to go.
If you follow us on Twitter/X, we'll be closing down that account in the next few days and moving to Bluesky. We'll continue using LinkedIn as our main social media focus. Hopefully the reasons for doing that are pretty obvious.
Over the last couple of years, I've been asked "is it still worth being on Twitter?" more times than I care to count. Up until now my answer has always been, "Yes but...". I've suggested that universities and research centres need to be better at shielding academics on the site, especially women, people of colour, anyone working on the hot topics of the culture wars, and others who are so often the targets of the Musk-ovites.
I no longer think that's the case. It’s time to go.
Not only is leaving now the right thing to do, now is also a strategically sensible time to make the shift.
Where we communicate our message always says something about us, and in large part it determines the audiences we're able to reach. For academics based in the UK, Elon Musk's increasingly alarming commentary on the recent far-right violence adds yet another burden for messages conveyed on his platform to bear. However, there are other reasons to move too:
1) Twitter/X just isn't very good anymore: The experience of using the site has been getting worse for years. The toxicity, the bots, the apparent silencing of certain views, and plenty of other problems have piled on top of one another. It's been easy enough to ignore each one but, when you step back and look at the whole pile, it's pretty unpleasant.
2) It's not fair: We should probably have moved when the first person had to deal with horrific abuse. But we normalised it instead. That's not to say that there aren't problems with other platforms, but those of us who get an easier ride treating the site as the only option either excludes those who are most often targeted from the conversation or demands they pay the price of our reluctance to change.
3) Research is different: If we were selling pizzas, perhaps there would be something to be said for ignoring it all and just churning Tweets out into the void. But researchers and those who communicate their work face particular demands navigating the landscape of the ‘post-truth’ world. Twitter/X is evermore obviously part of the problem and the presence of academic research lends it a credibility it doesn’t deserve.
4) How many followers do you really have?: Twitter is now so rife with bots and long-deceased Zombie accounts that it has become a bit meaningless to talk about the number of followers any of us has. The fundamental requirement of any communication delivery system is that you should be reasonably sure that your message is getting to the people you think it’s reaching. That seems an increasingly difficult claim to make about Twitter/X.
5) The alternatives are now better: One of the main reasons for staying was that there really wasn’t anywhere else to go. Social media platforms need a critical mass to work at all – there’s not much use in being the only person you know on one. However, all of the commonly mentioned alternatives – Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and a rejuvenated LinkedIn - have growing numbers of users and it can be useful to shake up who is seeing your content by starting somewhere new. There also appears to be a particular uptick in the academic presence on all of them.
6) You probably don't want to be seen to be last out of the building: Given that lots of people are leaving Twitter/X because they are offended by the values it promotes and the behaviour of its owner, even just from an entirely cynical perspective, it doesn’t look great to wait to the very last minute to make the switch.
7) People are looking for their favourites at the moment: Every time someone moves to a new platform, they search around for their favourite content. There is a surge on the alternative platforms most weeks at the moment, meaning lots of people looking for the content providers they followed on Twitter/X. It is useful if you’re already there when they’re looking.
Twitter/X really did have its moment. There was a time when it was an astonishingly powerful communications tool and genuinely came close to being 'the global town square' that it still claims to be. It has always been dominated by certain areas of the world and prioritised certain types of knowledge, but it was still quite useful. Now that town square seems not only an increasingly unpleasant place to spend time, there is also less and less to do there of any use.
Realistically, Twitter/X probably won't be replaced by a single, all-encompassing alternative. Bluesky, Mastadon and Threads all have their advantages, and LinkedIn seems to be an increasingly popular tool for research centres and individual academics. There's actually a lot to be said for developing a strategy that uses a blend of different tools, each of which allows you to speak to a particular audience on their own terms.
Inevitably moving will require some upheaval but moments like this, when different groups are moving around and ending up on different platforms, can be an excellent opportunity to try out new approaches and look for new audiences. You'll almost certainly discover new opportunities to connect and start up new conversations with groups you had no idea were out there but who are keen to hear what you have to say.
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