As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren't people, says study

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.

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image 📝 #WSocial state of the network - Friday July 10th 📣 for those who are curious about it, considering the enthusiastic endorsement by prestigious European institutions #OpenData allows me to crunch numbers. On day 23 since its beta launch in Brussels, W Social has 11291 accounts: - 469 new users since yesterday - 899 users have published one or more posts - 72 new users posting since yesterday - 92% have never* published a single post *may be related to #WIdentity and its 13-step process

How the Twitter/X Algorithm Works in 2026 (Source Code)

Twitter published its ranking weights on GitHub. A reply is worth 150x a like. Free accounts get 10x less reach. Full scoring system explained.

Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes

Engagement for tweets from @nytimes (53 million followers) is dwarfed by engagement for tweets from @GlobeEyeNews (866,000 followers).

The Pulse of The Planet, Flatlined: Why Twitter's Is Failing to Grow

No, it's not rampant abuse, weak leadership, or a product that intimidates new users. The roots of Twitter's stagnation go back to 2010.

Facebook and Twitter shutter pro-Trump network reaching 55 million accounts

They used AI-generated faces as profile photos

Just 18 unverified VIP accounts produce more than half of all W Social content. | W Don't Have Time | Offprint

W Social says users must verify themselves before they can post, yet most of the top 25 posters have no verification records and between them have created over 250,000 posts. Find out who gets to post on W Social without verification.

'ISIS has young people exactly where it wants them': Inside the terror networks operating on Instagram | LBC

An LBC investigation looking into the networks of Islamist terror accounts on Instagram has discovered at least 125 accounts with a combined follower count of more than 136,000 posting content sympathetic to proscribed groups

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter - The Atlan…

archived 7 Aug 2023 02:41:57 UTC

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.