Except you’ve got been dwelling beneath a moon rock, you’ve got seemingly heard that Twitter goes by way of some drama now that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is at the helm. Whereas Musk maintains that his main concern for the social media web site is to facilitate freedom of speech and expression, others on the platform, notably customers from marginalized communities, have expressed concern that the loosening of moderation guidelines will result in a rise in hate speech and misinformation.
Such fears have prompted many customers to stop, or at the very least threaten to stop, the location totally. And it is not simply political commentators or Twitter influencers; quite a few scientists, and at the very least one astronaut, have threatened to log out Twitter for good.
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Appears to be like like my days of Twitter with a blue checkmark are coming to an finish! I refuse out of precept to pay $7.99 to have a blue test mark subsequent to my identify. Additionally evaluating my participation on this platform and can depart if hateful messaging just isn’t regulated! Peace out @elonmuskNovember 6, 2022
The strikes are half of a bigger development beneath the hashtag #TwitterMigration, which is taking off amongst many within the science Twitter neighborhood, together with former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and others.Â
For this precise cause I’m parked at chanda@blacktwitter.io despite the fact that I’m not utilizing it proper now due to how a lot harassment I skilled on mastodon final week https://t.co/NtFB7Vb5x4November 16, 2022
In the meantime, others consider Musk is precisely the precise particular person to fulfill the problem of transitioning Twitter to profitability, given his success with SpaceX.Â
Persons are significantly doubting the man who can fly rockets to space and land them again on Earth cannot remedy social media @elonmusk#socialmedia #revolution #twitter #TwitterTakeover #twitterblades #TwitterLayoffs #TwitterMigration #TwitterBlueTick pic.twitter.com/uLTefLO0lnNovember 14, 2022
No matter Twitter’s final destiny, the Twitter local weather in latest weeks has led to an explosion in month-to-month energetic customers for Mastodon, a decentralized and ad-free social networking framework that operates extra like a set of autonomous Discord servers or Reddit communities than a single unified platform. In line with Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko, there are actually greater than one million month-to-month energetic customers on Mastodon.Â
This is likely to be a far cry from Twitter’s roughly quarter of a billion every day energetic customers — as reported in Twitter’s most recent financial disclosure in July 2022 — but it surely’s nonetheless a significant milestone for the volunteer-run social media platform.Â
I’ve simply set myself up on Mastodon as @ProfHughLewis@mastodon.on-line. I will likely be persevering with to put up threads on #SpaceDebris, #SpaceSustainability, #Starlink, #OneWeb, and my #MECFS journey right here on Twitter & on Mastodon in the meanwhileOctober 31, 2022
Mastodon has a considerably increased technical barrier to entry for many who are used to only logging in to a single Twitter account and seeing a timeline. However for Twitter customers within the science neighborhood — lots of whom are professors or energetic researchers in fields the place technical proficiency is a foregone conclusion — these limitations do not appear to have stemmed the tide in in the slightest degree.
The Twitter turmoil is likely to be awkward for some within the space neighborhood, who successfully discover themselves in rebel in opposition to the SpaceX CEO who has arguably completed extra to reinvigorate U.S. spaceflight previously decade than simply about anybody. However for a lot of astronomers, Twitter would possibly simply be the newest factor Musk has ruined for them.
Along with ferrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is deploying an enormous constellation of Starlink satellites to offer broadband web entry on a world scale, however on the unlucky value of flooding the night sky with bright, streaking objects which have wreaked havoc on ground-based astronomical observations.
It stays to be seen whether or not the Twitter exodus will proceed, however given the problem Musk faces in getting “Twitter 2.0” off the bottom, the celebrities would possibly simply be aligning for Twitter options akin to Mastodon.
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