It has now been a year since a mass exodus of the scientific community from Twitter seemed not just likely but nearly inevitable. The social media platform has gone through a remarkable period of upheaval under the leadership of a billionaire with confusing ideas about ‘freedom of speech’, and we all asked ourselves if it was time to be X-Tweeters?

Scientists of all disciplines were left wondering if the social media platform remained an appropriate place for them to communicate. No reasonable person could feel completely at ease with the nature of some of the content allowed on the platform. Since then, however, the dust has settled … at least a little. And for the most part, it remains business as usual on the popular platform.

But are there ethical issues remaining around the use of Twitter and will it remain a key part of science communication? Could further sudden changes threaten its credibility or the morality of helping to monetise it?

The platform itself is seventeen years old with neuroscientists worldwide having built up extensive followings, as well as valuable communities across the globe. At the time of writing, our journal’s following at @EJNeuroscience is approaching 21,000 and there is an exceptionally active community of EJN authors, readers and scientific commentators engaging with our content through this medium. A key aspect of this following is that these are individuals and organizations that have specifically chosen to engage with our content, and the years it has taken to curate and develop this following most certainly holds major value for our journal. More importantly, it provides huge value to our authors, whose science will be seen and consumed by a far greater audience than once was possible, surely the whole point of publishing one’s research.

Despite longstanding problems with hate speech and misinformation, the Twittersphere has become a deeply important public square for the sharing of ideas and research, for building community, and for scientists looking to share their work.

Twitter – under Jack Dorsey – was an easy target for criticism as it grappled with fake news, conspiracy theories, bad actors, as well as unsavoury and sometimes downright dangerous content (see Grignolio et al. (2022) for a discussion of the neural bases of susceptibility to such content).

There was always a sense however, that Twitter was at least committed to combating those things, often too late, but certainly better than never at all.

After the relatively short tenure of Elon Musk, that ethos of social responsibility already seems irrevocably compromised. Donald Trump is back even though he has only tweeted a single time, while many staff responsible for moderation and ethics have either been let go or have left the company. There has been a very obvious upsurge in far-right activity on the platform, with some research pointing to a biased amplification of right-leaning content by the personalization algorithms employed on the Twitter platform (Huszár et al., 2022). Also raising a further ethical dilemma has been the targeted misuse of Twitter to spread misinformation during conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere.

In many communities, there has been a slow exodus to alternative platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky, but most users remain poised between two social networks … unwilling to abandon Twitter quite yet, and still waiting to see what will happen in the months and years to come. Over a year on from the initial Musk-driven exodus impetus, Mastodon has not proven to be a realistic alternative for most potential adopters, despite best intentions, as it has proven tricky to use and lacks many of the features and flexibility that Twitter provides. It is perhaps an irony that the former US President’s Truth Social is based on the Mastodon open-source license (Kan, 2021).

It is a dilemma, not least because of the amount of work that individual scientists have put into their Twitter accounts. Over more than a decade, some have built followings of tens of thousands, incredibly valuable networks of contacts. All of this took time, and it took effort. Having to abandon it feels challenging, and also defeatist. Are we really willing to cede the space to those who would abuse it?

There is an inertia too in having to start from scratch on Mastodon, BlueSky, or elsewhere. There are new rules to get used to, content warnings to watch out for, and all the idiosyncrasies of adapting to new platforms that may not be as intuitive or easy to use. There is also that sense of a more closed insular community, that the ideas and research shared there is being confined to a much narrower audience.

Twitter truly felt global, and it will take time for any alternative platform to achieve that sense of scale, if indeed one ever does.

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To prepare this editorial, we spoke to people in the neuroscience community and the wider scientific community about how important Twitter has been to them and if the recent turmoil in the company has changed how they use the platform.

Dr Nathan Smith, Associate professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester (New York, USA), said it was critically important that scientists “stay the course” and said he could not in good conscience leave the social media platform.

“I’m staying the course and using it like I always used it. I am still disseminating my science, and still politically active because I think it’s important.”

Dr Smith said he knew of some who had already left the platform, concerned that their continued presence was simply serving to enrich Elon Musk.

But Twitter has become such an important facet of science, that it would seem like an admission of defeat to simply cede that territory to bad actors.

“Science is real and we should be disseminating our science. We should use facts to fight misinformation. You need that balance and accountability. Just look at what misinformation did during the Covid-19 pandemic: a lot of people died because of misinformation, and we need people to fight misinformation with truth and facts.”

Dr Smith said it was almost impossible to overstate how important Twitter had been for his scientific career, and continued to be for early-career scientists, even more so for those from minority backgrounds.

He said: “I always tell my trainees nobody knows if you publish a paper. People don’t always go to PubMed. But if you tweet about it, and let people know it is there, people will know that you exist.

“It has been phenomenal for my scientific career; it has been so important for people who look like me, especially people from minority communities – that people like them are making strides in STEM. To know that other people are out there [already].”

Dr Smith said the universality of Twitter would be hard to replicate on other websites.

“I have other social media platforms. LinkedIn, and you do get views there. Mastodon – it’s only people in your group, you’re preaching to your core constituency.

“With Twitter, everybody sees it. Millions and millions of eyeballs are going to see it [there]. If we stay in our own little silos, we live in these bubbles and we don’t know what people outside are doing. Twitter helps to remove those bubbles.”

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Despite the constant talk of misinformation on Twitter, the platform has also been a key tool for combatting misinformation and flawed science.

Ivan Oransky, Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute (New York, USA), and the co-founder of RetractionWatch, has used his account to help highlight plagiarism, paper mills, and faulty data in research.

Twitter is just one component of how they reach their audiences with Mr Oransky saying he had adapted a “wait and see” approach.

“I tend to take a fairly deliberative approach, I try and do that with all of my work. My initial read with alternatives is that they are interesting. But I don’t buy the first new phone; I don’t buy the first new anything [and there are] a lot of kinks to work out.

“We are waiting and seeing. We have seen some troubling things on the platform; but we have seen some troubling things there for many years.”

He said a key focus for RetractionWatch recently was their daily email bulletin, which has already built a large audience -, something he described as “very gratifying”.

“We have some real core readership who receive the content that way,” he said, “Twitter is a platform; it is not the only one.”

He urged scientists not to put all their eggs in one basket and consider whether there were other platforms for them to disseminate their work.

Mr Oransky also said he had a concern over Altmetric, which relied heavily on Twitter to determine how much attention research and scientists have generated.

“There are lots of [other] ways to reach people and engage. It would be a shame if Twitter became as bad as people think – but the world will move on. There are things invented and they end all the time.”

Dr Elisabeth Bik, who is renowned for her work on the detection of photo manipulation in scientific research and serves as a Science Integrity Consultant, said she had noticed already the impact of recent changes to Twitter on the reach of her work.

“I feel I’m using [it] a lot less,” she said, “I’m still checking what Elon Musk is doing, a bit like most people. But I feel restricted. I feel like somebody is watching me and I might just be suspended at the whim of the CEO. I have set up an account on Mastodon [many months ago]; I have posted a little bit and I can’t say I like it very much.”

Dr Bik said she was heavily reliant on Twitter for the dissemination of her work.

“For me, it’s my main outlet,” she said.

“Without it, I would not be where I am now. I love the platform. It’s incredibly important. It has created wonderful communities and … a lot of nastiness as well.”

Dr Bik said it had been key in ensuring accuracy in scientific journals, to discourage them from keeping issues that arose “indoors”.

“With Twitter, I can share the inertness of the scientific publishing world. Without it, there would be more injustice and in general, social media has played a huge role in exposing all kinds of myths and wrongdoing. It has also contributed to a lot of hate, so it has been a double-edged sword.”

Dr Bik said she had already noticed less engagement with what she posts to Twitter, and worried that harassment of the scientific community would become more prevalent.

She said: “I’m very worried about that. With the little [amount of] moderation gone out the window, I’m worried that will lead to much more misinformation and also for the scientific community, much less credibility. Scientists are being harassed and they don’t seem to have a way to stop that.

“I’ve had a lot of hate, especially over the last two years, mainly from the anti-vax community. But I haven’t really seen a lot of change so far. I just see a lot more worries about what will happen and the potential for new rules. It feels very uncertain.”

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Dr Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland), who writes the popular Wiring the Brain blog, said he was grappling with the ethical issues of sticking with Twitter.

He said he had made an account on Mastodon but continued to post on Twitter where he has a following of more than 36,000.

“I’m not sure 100% I want to be continuing to support that platform [Twitter]. Even initially from the point of view of worker rights, [as well as] all the other issues of not having proper ethical oversight of scrutiny and moderation.

“It is a bit worrying and what I’ve noticed so far, there just seems to be less activity of scientists and others I would normally interact with. I know many people have already left.”

He said Twitter had been “indispensable” for connecting across different scientific fields, particularly for his inter-disciplinary research.

“The communities have been really genuine,” he said, “I’ve had lots of productive ideas and specific collaborations.”

Dr Mitchell said there may come a tipping point where remaining on Twitter is no longer an option.

“If it becomes a site where really racist propaganda and misinformation comes back and isn’t moderated, then I’d really have to rethink it. I’d hate to just abandon the arena to trolls and bad actors. But at the same time, it’s hard to tolerate it on a personal level.”

He said while a new community of neuroscientists was building on Mastodon, it had the potential to become a little bit “insular”.

“Twitter was wide open and you can find yourself interacting with a philosopher, or an economist, or just members of the public. That’s what I think made it great.”

It’s not just individual scientists who have reaped the benefits of Twitter either.

For academic publisher Wiley, the social media platform has been a way for them to share research and education resources, and engage directly with the scientific community.

A spokeswoman said: “Not including journal-specific accounts, [we have] a Twitter audience of over 1.4 million people across disciplines and community-focused accounts. Additionally, we saw 4.5 million visits from Twitter to Wiley Online Library in 2022.”

Dr Tim Mosca, an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) said that Twitter had become an essential tool for the scientific community.

“[It has] been a wonderful platform for all its foibles, a wonderful tool for the scientific and academic community. It brings a lot more voices into the world, voices that would not traditionally be heard. It has introduced me to new science, and introduced [me to] people who I would not have met otherwise. It has really, as cheesy as this might sound, built community.”

Dr Mosca said for young scientists, it was so important, as well as helping bring greater equity to science.

“[It] is absolutely essential for people coming up in science right now and even for established labs, groups, faculties, and scientists to get their science out to a new generation.

“Twitter gives people a platform to talk about being a first-generation academic. We talk about equity in science and the problems academia faces to get more people represented, more people working together. It [Twitter] really was, and has been, a tool for making science and academia a better place and a better community.”

He said science’s special place on Twitter was something “worth fighting for”.

“I’m not ready to give it up. Science as a whole has put a lot of effort and work into Twitter. We’ve built a community and what we’ve built is strong and impressive, and has helped a lot of people. I’m not willing to let the follies of one ill-advised individual ruin that for so many people.”

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So where do we stand today, a year on from a takeover that has left many of us feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Indeed, what do we even call this thing anymore?

Still, despite continuing unease, the Neuroscience community does not appear ready to cede the field to the misinformation brigade just yet, and a strong case can be made that remaining is the only way to fight back. As the months tick by, many of the early abstainers have trickled back, and for those of us who stayed active, business has for the most part proceeded as usual. There is no doubt that Twitter has become a major conduit by which the scientific youth movement consumes information, forms networks of key opinion formers, and in turn, promotes their work. The speed at which major findings are transmitted to the community is remarkable. Key information in preprints, which might have taken months or years to filter through to the collective consciousness of our field, is now quickly consumed and distributed. Major debates about signal processing routines, poor statistical approaches, provision of code through sharing services, are just some of the obvious benefits. Perhaps more importantly, the platform has allowed people from the non-science community to interact directly and rapidly with the science community in ways that were previously impossible and is surely leading to greater science literacy, and in turn, to better science communication. For now, absent an alternative platform that is at least as functional as Twitter, it appears that it is here to stay for now, and we are left to make the best of it despite its issues. Perhaps this is a fight the community needs to embrace.