The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics off Twitter?

Abstract

Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk's takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter's approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses 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 by 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, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others' tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others' content).