Research Reveals Mass Departure of Environmentalists from Twitter After Elon Musk’s Acquisition

Researchers have discovered that approximately 50% of environmentally conscious individuals who were previously engaged on Twitter have departed from the platform within six months after Musk assumed control. This exodus could potentially have significant consequences for the public conversation regarding crucial topics like biodiversity, climate change, and the recovery from natural disasters.

The researchers studied a group of 3,80,000 “environmentally oriented users” on Twitter, which included people from the conservation community who actively engaged in pro-environmental conversations about topics such as climate change and biodiversity.

Only 52.5 percent of these environmental users were found to be actively using Twitter in the six months since Musk took over the microblogging platform. Users were considered “active” if they posted to the platform at least once in a 15-day period.

Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022, had previously served as the leading social media platform for environmental discourse.

“Twitter has been the dominant social media platform for diverse environmental interests to communicate and organize around advocacy goals, exchange ideas and research, and new opportunities for collaboration,” wrote the US-based research group of biologists and environmental consultants.

The study, published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, found that the dropout rate was significantly higher than in other “comparable online communities,” including users who discuss public politics on the platform.

“There is currently no platform equivalent to Twitter,” the team wrote.

“Therefore, any change in engagement among pro-environmental users raises serious questions about where to follow the environmental debate and how to mobilize pro-environmental segments of the public,” they wrote.

The authors urged researchers to take an active role in moving toward different modes of environmental communication—whether it’s advocating for Twitter to change to become a useful platform for environmentalists again, or collectively moving to another platform like Mastodon or Threads.

“Twitter’s future as an information and research platform is uncertain,” the authors wrote.

“We need to create collaborations between industry, the nonprofit sector, and academia to track public engagement with the environment on social media platforms for the benefit of primary research, applied environmentalism, and climate mitigation,” they said in their study.