Across Penn and the rest of academia, the general level of concern about the continued utility and stability of Twitter has risen with each new change Elon Musk has announced.
Over the last decade, Twitter has played a massive role in the way health services researchers communicate with each other, coordinate their collaborations, and conduct the dissemination activities so crucial to getting their results in front of the broad scientific and policy-making communities they serve.
On Nov. 22, Musk published this new policy on the Twitter site: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” Previously, between January 2020 and November 2022, Twitter had suspended more than 11,000 accounts for violating its COVID-19 misinformation rules.
LDI senior fellows Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School, Atheendar Venkataramani of the Perelman School of Medicine, and Holly Fernandez Lynch of the School of Medicine and the Penn Carey Law School weigh in on Twitter’s current upheaval, and whether they think the situation at Twitter will impact how they disseminate research in the future.
“If enough people who I learn from or disseminate to leave the platform, then I would probably stop investing in it,” says Venkataramani. “Same thing if the algorithm changes so drastically that no one sees my tweets or that I don’t see tweets from accounts I learned from.”
“For the first time since I started using Twitter, I’ve seen engagement with posts about science plummet, people I enjoy following (and who have amplified my work) have fled the platform, and it has generally become a far less interesting place to talk about science,” says Milkman. “I’m very disappointed in the changes.”
Read more at Penn LDI.
