The number of environmentalists on Twitter went into freefall in the past year

Perhaps you’ve noticed that since the social network known as X (formerly known as Twitter) passed into the hands of Elon Musk, discussions about the environment have become increasingly rare on the platform. And there may be a logical explanation for that: almost 50% of users who were passionate about the subject have abandoned the social network in the last six months.

An “exodus.” This is the term used by a team of American researchers in a study, published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, to describe the drastic decrease in exchanges of ideas and discussions about the environment on Twitter. A change observed since Elon Musk bought the social network in October 2022, recently rebranded as “X.”

“Twitter has been the dominant social media platform for diverse environmental interests to communicate and organize around advocacy goals, exchange ideas and research, and find new opportunities for collaboration,” observes the team that led the work.

To reach this conclusion, the team of researchers, made up of biologists and environmental consultants, studied a group of 380,000 “environmentally-oriented” users with an interest in ecology-related topics, such as climate change, biodiversity and policy. Users were considered “active” if they posted messages on the platform at least once during a 15-day period.

After sifting through tweets posted between July 2019 and April 2023, the researchers found that in the six months following Musk’s takeover of Twitter, only 52.5% of these users were still actively using Twitter, a significantly higher abandonment rate than other “comparable online communities,” including users discussing general politics on the platform, the study notes.

According to the authors, Twitter is currently unrivalled as a social network for exchanges, debates, actions, research and collaboration on environmental issues. This, they say, raises serious questions for both the general public and academic research: “Given Twitter’s importance for public communication, our finding has troubling implications for digital information sharing and public mobilization.”

“The future of Twitter as a platform for outreach and research is uncertain…. Such changes amplify the need to create collaborations across industry, the non-profit sector, and academia to track public engagement with the environment across social media platforms for the benefit of primary research, applied environmental conservation and climate change mitigation,” the researchers conclude. – AFP Relaxnews