Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges
www.france24.com
Scientists suffering insults and mass-spam are abandoning Twitter for alternative social networks as hostile climate-change denialism surges on the platform following Elon Musk's takeover.

EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.

Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.

While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.

  • Gsus4English
    2·
    3 months ago

    Twitter’s format feels a bit like yelling into the void and waiting for replies…you may luck out and get some engagement from a hub or a small subgraph of the network. Mastodon makes that stronger by removing the algorithm (I’d like there to be a user-customizable feed sort algo by an array of parameters, not sure what the technical limitations to that are: processing, security?)

    Comment trees feel better (to me at least), because there is a hierarchical origin, a native indexing by topic>post>comment>countercomment…it sort of resembles how we relate with the world or navigate maps.