A study published Tuesday, August 15 in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in ecology and evolution shows that environmental and climate activists have been particularly numerous to leave Twitter – renamed X – after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network. The team from the University of Pomona in California compared two groups of users interested in politics: the first, made up of 458,000 Internet users who posted messages about the 2020 US presidential election, served as a witness group; the second, comprising 380,000 accounts that have posted different messages about climate change or biodiversity, was created in October 2022, when Twitter was taken over.
The research team then measured the posts of these accounts in late 2022 and early 2023, to see which ones were still active (using the fact that they posted at least one message in a two-week period as a criterion). . “The share of active accounts decreased for the “environment” group as well as for the “politics” group”the researchers note, “but a significantly higher percentage of users in the ‘environment’ group went out of business”. In April, only 52.5% of the accounts in the “environment” group continued to post on the social network, against 79.4% of users in the “politics” group. Both sets contained mostly US users.
These results “confirm disturbing early reports of the growing amount of climate change disinformation and disinformation on Twitter”, say the authors. Several recent studies have thus shown that the new moderation rules implemented by the social network greatly facilitate the spread of intox, especially climatic ones.
New studies complicated to conduct
Elon Musk notably fired much of the social network’s moderation teams after its takeover and restored the accounts of a large number of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists. Although the multibillionaire himself does not deny the reality of climate change, on several occasions he has spread dubious or false messages about its causes and consequences, in particular the role of agriculture in greenhouse gas emissions.
Under Elon Musk, Twitter has also gone after some environmental organizations. The social network has so recently accused the European Climate Foundation of helping the NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which fights against online hate, to analyze the social network’s data for a study showing the responsibility of platform in spreading hateful messages. The social network has filed a complaint against the CCDH, which it accuses of damaging its reputation.
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