Twitter, now renamed X, is losing its green flavour, said a team of researchers after they found that half of green twitters regularly posting about the climate and nature crises abandoned the media platform after it was taken over by Elon Musk. The analysis is published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
The researchers had analysed the 380,000 users who tweeted regularly about global heating and biodiversity and found that 47.5 per cent had become inactive six months after the final takeover. Terming the decline as ‘troubling’, they said the “exodus of environmental users on Twitter is an existential threat” to a main way of informing people who want to take climate action.
“The incredible power of Twitter was that it was this open forum where people could share ideas and opinions and influence other people,” said Prof Charlotte Chang, of Pomona College in the US, who led the research. “We have this immense challenge of empowering stakeholders across all sectors of society to take action to halt the loss of biodiversity and to combat catastrophic climate change. We were pretty disheartened to find that after the sale, our environmental Twitter community has really declined.”
The report analysed the Twitter use of the groups in 15-day intervals from July 2019 to April 2023. A user was deemed to be active if they tweeted at least once about their topic in a 15-day window.
Chang said it was uncertain where the environmental discourse now missing from Twitter might be moving to, with Mastodon, Threads and Instagram yet to replicate the past success of Twitter in this area. She said the decline on Twitter could well continue, with previous research on social networks noting a snowball effect where users leaving leads to others following.
“This snowball may have been kicked off too much to really halt the ongoing trend,” Chang said. The researchers highlighted initiatives such as the Coalition for Independent Technology Research as a way of raising coordinated concerns to Twitter and policymakers.
Chang said plans to start charging significant sums for access to large numbers of tweets via the platform’s API would damage research. “It would make it impossible to access and understand what’s happening on these platforms, to document their positive contributions to society as well as some of the harms,” she said.