A Second Academic Exodus From X?

Two years ago, after Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, promptly renaming it X, numerous academics decamped from the platform. Now, in the wake of a presidential election fraught with online disinformation, a second exodus from the social media site appears underway.

Academics, including some with hundreds of thousands of followers, announced departures from the platform in the immediate aftermath of the election, decrying the toxicity of the website and objections to Musk and how he wielded the platform to back President-elect Donald Trump. The business mogul threw millions of dollars behind Trump and personally campaigned for him this fall. Musk also personally advanced various debunked conspiracy theories during the election cycle.

Amid another wave of exits, some users see this as the end of Academic Twitter, which was already arguably in its death throes.

Postelection Exits

Former Southern New Hampshire University president Paul LeBlanc was among the high-profile academics who have declared they are leaving X, citing a problematic tilt toward disinformation.

“Going off this platform now. It has become a toxic cesspool, is owned by someone I despise, and has become a tool for disinformation. I miss the fun days of Twitter and sorry to lose contact with so many. Will look for other platforms on which to connect,” LeBlanc posted last week on his now-deleted account.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, LeBlanc said he started using Twitter in 2008 to follow other academics but noticed a change when Musk took over. His feed became “full of toxic stuff,” which prompted him to use the platform less before deciding to leave.

“When the first wave of defections occurred, when Elon took over, I really wrestled with the question [to leave] then. And a lot of people have made a case that we shouldn’t cede the platform over to others, that our voice deserves to have its place there as well,” LeBlanc said.

But recently, after spending time on the site, LeBlanc said he “usually came away feeling worse for the experience,” which made him decide “I don’t need to be part of that.”

Borrowing from Aristotle, LeBlanc said, “We can’t have a discussion about what should be if we can’t agree on what is. If there’s one thing that characterizes this election, it’s that we did not have a shared reality, we had two universes at work, and I think Elon contributed to that.”

Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College, announced his exit by declaring Musk a dangerous fascist and encouraged others to leave the platform with him. While he’s keeping his account active to allow other users to direct message him, Kamola wrote by email he plans to stop posting due to concerns about disinformation and his distaste for X’s owner.

“Twitter has become a plaything of a plutocrat man-child who relishes in trolling the vulnerable and spreading disinformation. Pathetic. I could no longer justify being on that platform,” he said.

Kamola added that he was tired of seeing “irrelevant posts, dumb stuff that had no relevance to what I was actually interested in.”

The final straw for Kamola was when he saw a post from right-wing conspiracy peddler Catturd in his feed, an account Musk has worked to promote. At that point, he said, “It was time to leave.”

Jay Rosen, a New York University professor with more than 300,000 followers, was another well-known academic who said he would step away from the site (but keep his account open).

“Starting Monday I won’t be continuing at this site … For a while Twitter was a way to do journalism education in public, for a public—and for free. I think I was effective at times in that role. I no longer know how that’s done,” Rosen wrote on X.

LeBlanc, Kamola and Rosen all mentioned that they were moving to the platform Bluesky, which has grown to 14.5 million users, welcoming more than 700,000 new accounts in recent days. In September, Bluesky had nine million users.

(X did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.)

Staying Put

Other academics, however, plan to stick with the platform.

Paul Novosad, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, argued that academics should remain on X as a way to continue to engage with a broader audience, despite the rising number of online trolls there.

“I understand the academic impetus to move to a new platform. But I think it is bad for the commons if all the academics disappear and only talk to each other. We need your good ideas to be shared widely as much we ever did,” Novosad wrote in a post last week.

Novosad warned against academics retreating “to their own social media bubble” and shared tips on how to use the platform, including making heavy use of the block and mute functions.

And some cited the appeal of a broader audience as a reason to stay.

“Since Academic Twitter officially ended yesterday, I’m also at Blue Sky. I always follow back. But I’ll stay on Twitter for the foreseeable future as well because I like that the readership is much more diverse than university personnel alone,” Josh Shepperd, a media studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, posted on X after the presidential election.

Shepperd told Inside Higher Ed by email that he felt X had taken a “regressive turn.”

But he believes it’s more than just Musk driving academics away, suggesting that the “flight from Twitter isn’t just reflective of its owner” and amounts to a retreat by academics “from recent turns to increase public engagement, which ran strong between roughly 2010 and now.”

The Death of Academic Twitter?

For years, Academic Twitter was a space to connect with other users around shared research or policy interests and for scholars to engage the public and press directly. Some professors leveraged their academic expertise and witty musings into massive social media followings.

Many used the website to seek or offer advice to fellow academics and raise concerns about issues at their universities or statehouses. Satire accounts poked fun at the absurdities of academe. While those purposes remain, many of the users that comprised Academic Twitter have either deactivated their accounts or disengaged from the platform, according to recent research.

A study published in PS: Political Science & Politics last month concluded that academics began to engage less after Musk bought the platform. But the peak of disengagement wasn’t when the billionaire took over the site in October 2022 but rather the next month, when he reinstated Donald Trump’s account, which the platform’s previous owners deactivated following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, which he encouraged.

The researchers reviewed 15,700 accounts from academics in economics, political science, sociology and psychology for their study.

James Bisbee, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University and article co-author, wrote via email that changes to the platform, particularly to the application programming interface, or API, undermined their ability to collect data for their research.

“Twitter used to be an amazing source of data for political scientists (and social scientists more broadly) thanks in part to its open data ethos,” Bisbee wrote. “Since Musk’s takeover, this is no longer the case, severely limiting the types of conclusions we could draw, and theories we could test, on this platform.”

To Bisbee, that loss is an understated issue: “Along with many other troubling developments on X since the change in ownership, the amputation of data access should not be ignored.”