Spend any time on Twitter and you'll quickly conclude that everyone is outraged about everything. It's time we put that energy to use in the real world.
Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky
Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.
"Did We Create This Monster?" How Twitter Turned Toxic - Fast Company
For years, the company’s zeal for free speech blinded it to safety concerns. Now it’s scrambling to make up for lost time.
What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
This started with a tweet. I’m embarrassed how often that happens.
Twitterlike is a Bad Shape
Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
A Tweet Before Dying
The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.
The Next Twitter Is Just Thousands of Smaller Twitters
One of the biggest open-ended questions in the tech world is whether Twitter is truly dying—and if it is, what will replace it. Last December, I argued that whatever came next might feel like Twitter in certain ways, but that ultimately there was probably no way to recapture the lightning in a ...
How The Enshittification Of Social Media Is Decreasing The Switching Costs And Enabling Something New
In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also…
Do social media threaten democracy?
Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong
The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter - The Atlan…
archived 7 Aug 2023 02:41:57 UTC
Elon Musk reportedly forced Twitter algorithm to boost his tweets after Super Bowl flop
A tweet from Joe Biden garnered triple the impressions than Musk’s game time post, sending Twitter engineers scrambling to boost their boss
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of emotion perception online. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Using a Twitter field survey, we measured authors’ moral outrage in real time and compared authors’ reports to observers’ judgements of the authors’ moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Preregistered confirmatory behavioural experiments found that overperception of individuals’ moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.
The Danger of Exaggerating the Political Importance of Social Media - Cal Newport
The Pew Research Center recently released a new study on American Twitter use. As Jennifer Rubin reported in the Washington Post, one of the most ... Read more
Positech@CSCW2026
People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action.
The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter
The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.
Ingmar Rentzhog (@ingmar.wsocial.eu)
Criticism and scrutiny are welcome. But why so much hostility? Why assume the worst about our motives? I honestly don’t understand. If we share the goal of better social media, let’s talk about how to get there.
