The vibes are off : did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter?

BISBEE, James; MUNGER, Kevin

doi:10.1017/S1049096524000416

The vibes are off : did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter?

dc.contributor.author	BISBEE, James
dc.contributor.author	MUNGER, Kevin
dc.date.accessioned	2024-10-24T14:32:39Z
dc.date.available	2024-10-24T14:32:39Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.description	Published online: 15 October 2024	en
dc.description.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).	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	PS: political science & politics, 2024, OnlineFirst	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1017/S1049096524000416
dc.identifier.issn	1537-5935
dc.identifier.issn	1049-0965
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77385
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.orcid.upload	true	*
dc.publisher	Cambridge University Press	en
dc.relation.ispartof	PS: political science & politics	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.rights.license	Attribution 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/	*
dc.title	The vibes are off : did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter?	en
dc.type	Article	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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person.identifier.orcid	0000-0002-4399-5250
person.identifier.other	55624
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