There have been a lot of changes at Twitter. In fact, you’re not even supposed to call it that. It’s been renamed and rebranded as X, the name favored by the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Despite the changes it’s still widely used and valued by San Diego scientists. But they are seeing less of what they used to like.
“What I like is seeing — like I told you — (is) the latest and greatest academic. Vigorous discussion. Links to new things. Education. I’m seeing less of that,” said Aaron Goodman, a cancer physician and researcher at UC San Diego
Twitter’s followers include many scientists, like Goodman, who use it as a way to communicate with colleagues and share each other's work. But now that Twitter is owned by Musk, some scientists have fled the platform and many others say it's not what it used to be.
Goodman said he’s seeing a lot more what he calls B.S. on his Twitter feed — polarizing content and stuff that looks like it came from bots.
“I don’t have strong opinions on Elon Musk. My opinion is Twitter is worse since Elon Musk took over. My user experience is worse,” he said.
Twitter used to be democratic and accessible, said Miguel Reina-Campos, a UCSD immunologist. But, he said, things changed when the platform started allowing people to pay to promote their content and to receive the “Blue Check,” formerly a Twitter guarantee that a content source was legitimate.
“So when you change that core, underlying rule of the system, then everything starts shifting again to a point where now you’re not seeing things you are interested in,” Reina-Campos said. “You’re seeing things that people have paid for.”
In another controversial move, Musk invited former President Donald Trump back to the platform. Twitter had banned Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
National Public Radio and KPBS stopped posting on Twitter to provide their content after Musk called NPR “state-affiliated media.” The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s political views tend toward conspiracy theories, said Rebecca Nee, a San Diego State University journalism professor. And, she said, he made his content preferences clear when he began laying off staff.
“He fired a lot of people and a lot of those people were working on the content moderation issues, trying to take down disinformation and shut down trolls and bot accounts,” Nee said. “All of that went out the window.”
The best evidence of the departure of scientists from the platform came in an article in the journal Nature this August. Their survey of scientists worldwide showed that just under 7% have stopped using Twitter altogether. Just less than half have recently joined other social-media competitors like Bluesky or Threads.
But where else do you go?
Uri Manor, a UCSD cell biologist, said he doesn’t discount the criticisms of Twitter and he agrees with some of them. But he has a caveat.
“Somehow people seem to think that these other sites are going to be better because maybe they are not run by Elon or Mark Zuckerberg,” Manor said. “And I’m very skeptical. I’m very skeptical that it’s their fault that these places can suck sometimes.”
Computer scientist Pat Pannuto, also at UCSD, said his interest in the platform has waned as its “signal to noise ratio” got worse. But he also believes some of that problem predated the takeover by Musk and the transition from Twitter to X.
Biologist Reina-Campos is dismayed by the new management and their apparent tweaks to the algorithms. But he’s still using the platform.
“I haven’t found anything as good as Twitter yet,” he said.
Back in his office at the Moores Cancer Center, Aaron Goodman, the UCSD cancer doctor, opens his X feed and points out some things he still likes about the platform.
“That’s the link to the paper. Someone can read this paper and clearly see my opinion. And here’s the engagement,” he said, referencing a comment on the paper and then a person he describes as a “troll.”
Virtually all of the scientists I spoke to for this story are still using X. In its glory days, Twitter was a forum scientists could use to “get out from behind the walls of their peer-reviewed journals,” Nee said.
They still do that. But faith in the platform has diminished.
And if the cost to scientists is a degraded social media platform, the cost to Elon Musk has also been considerable. He bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion.
He admitted in a post last month that it’s now worth considerably less.
