Trends in
Ecology & Evolution
Science & Society
Environmental users
abandoned Twitter after
Musk takeover
Charlotte H. Chang , 1,2,*
Nikhil R. Deshmukh, 3
Paul R. Armsworth, 4 and
Yuta J. Masuda 5
In our sample of 380 000 environ-
mentally oriented users, nearly
50% became inactive on Twitter
after it was sold in October 2022, a
rate much higher than a control
sample. Given Twitter’s importance
for public communication, our find-
ing has troubling implications for
digital environmental information
sharing and public mobilization.
Twitter’s importance for public
discourse
Twitter has been the dominant social
media platform for diverse environmental
interests to communicate and organize
around advocacy goals, exchange ideas
and research, and find new opportunities
for collaboration. As a result, Twitter has
been used to track a broad array of topics
important to conservation and environ-
mental research, ranging from biodiversity
conservation, human–nature interactions,
climate change beliefs, extreme weather
disaster responses, and environmental
policy preferences, as well as to dissemi-
nate information and mobilize public inter-
est by environmental non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and public agencies
[1–4]. There is currently no platform equiv-
alent to Twitter. Thus, any changes in
engagement by environmentally minded
users raises serious questions about
where to track discourse about environ-
mental conservation and how to mobilize
pro-environmental segments of the public.
We provide evidence that the recent ac-
quisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has led
to the rapid decline of pro-environmental
Twitter users (henceforth, ‘Environmental
Twitter’) at a rate higher than comparable
online communities.
Changes in Twitter’s governance
have real-world impacts
Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, re-
searchers and industry scientists have
raised alarms about the platform’s integrity
[5,6]. Days after the acquisition was finalized
on 28 October 2022, industry analysts re-
ported that over one million users were no
longer active on the platform, a doubling of
the previous baseline [6]. Rising abuse
and hate speech on the platform due to
Musk’s decision to change content moder-
ation could have driven this change. Recent
findings suggest that hate speech in-
creased substantially after the Twitter sale
and that engagement increased much
more markedly for contentious right-wing
actors than a comparison sample [7–9].
Changes to the application programming
interface (API) and service outages have im-
peded volunteer and researcher access to
real-time Twitter data with real-world conse-
quences. For instance, these changes
posed major hurdles to crowd-sourcing in-
formation during the recent earthquake in
Turkey and Syria [10]. The platform’s modi-
fied governance resulted in overdue pay-
ments to cloud services vendors such as
Google Cloud, accompanied by throttling
user access to posts, negatively impacting
user experience and information sharing
[11]. Changes since Twitter’s acquisition
likely have ripple effects for other user seg-
ments, such as the climate policy sphere,
or future disaster response after extreme
weather events.
These reports raise questions about the
continued usefulness of Twitter as a data
source and platform for environmental
advocates, researchers, and educators.
We compare changes in platform usage be-
tween a set of over 380 000 environmental
Trends in Ecology & Evolution, October 2023, Vol. 38, No. 10
supporters, a group that frequently dis-
cussed climate change mitigation and
biodiversity conservation (‘Environmental
Twitter’, [3,4]), against a broader control
sample of individuals discussing the 2020
US presidential election (‘Politics Twitter’,
[12]). We chose Politics Twitter as a com-
parison sample because the 2020 US pres-
idential election and the two major
candidates were some of the most dis-
cussed topics and people on the platform;
therefore, Politics Twitter should represent
a broader slice of Twitter as a whole. In
fact, Politics Twitter originally included
about 17 000 Environmental Twitter users.
To ensure that the two samples were non-
overlapping, we subset Politics Twitter to
458 000 users, excluding the 17 000 over-
lapping users in this sample. We examined
the proportion of users active in every 15-
day window between July 2019 and April
2023. For any given time point, we assumed
that users were active if their account
already existed and they posted at least
one tweet on or after that date. To estimate
potential variation, we bootstrapped our
data 1000 times in each 15-day window.
In our figure, we annotate relevant dates in
Musk’s takeover of Twitter [8]. We also
analyzed whether or not the rate of change
in the proportion of active users differed
significantly before and after Musk’s take-
over. We aggregated these data into pre-
and post-takeover periods, totaling 79 and
11 2-week observations, respectively, and
used our bootstrapped data to estimate
the confidence interval (CI) for the rate of
change in active users.
The proportion of active users decreased
for both Environmental and Politics Twitter.
However, significantly more Environmental
Twitter users became inactive compared
with the Politics sample (Figure 1A). By
April 2023, only 52.5% of the Environmen-
tal Twitter users were still active [bootstrap
99% CI: (52.2%, 52.7%)] while 79.4% of
the Politics users were still active [99% CI:
(79.2%, 79.6%)]. The rate of change in
the proportion of active users can arguably
893
 Trends in Ecology & Evolution

(A) 1.0
ecologists, social scientists, conservation
Active user proportion

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est groups. For advocates and researchers
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that rely heavily on Twitter, the exodus of en-
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threat to the primary mode used to dissemi-
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nate information, mobilize diverse audiences,
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debates and sentiments around the world’s
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Change in active users

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bitrarily and seemingly overnight, Freelon [14]
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are robust to changes in access. Changes
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in governance and access for social media
Politics Environmental
platforms call for mobilization among re-
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Trends in Ecology & Evolution twitter-api-access-threatens-public-interest-

Figure 1. Tracking changes among Environmental and Politics Twitter users. (A) The proportion of research/) offer one avenue for raising
users that were active in each 15-day window. (B) The rate of change in the proportion of active users for both coordinated concerns to Twitter and policy-
samples. In both plots, the points depict the observed data while the color band with a broken line shows the makers. Nevertheless, if individuals inter-
99% confidence interval based on a bootstrap sample of the data. The broken vertical line corresponds to 25
April 2023, when the Twitter board accepted Musk’s initial purchase offer, and the heavier broken line
ested in the environment abandon Twitter
corresponds to 28 October 2022, when Musk’s takeover was finalized. for competitors such as Mastodon or
Meta’s Threads, that necessitates agile
responses on the part of advocates and
better reveal any rapid changes in user ac- users was larger for Environmental Twitter
researchers. This may range, for instance,
tivity after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition. compared with Politics Twitter (Table 1).
from efforts to track which platforms envi-
Again, while we saw the rate of change be- Thus, our findings augment troubling re-
ronmental voices are adopting to a broad
come more negative through time for both ports of rising climate change dis- and mis-
campaign to migrate supporters to a new
samples, the magnitude was significantly information on the platform [13].
platform so that there are continued oppor-
larger for the Environmental Twitter users
tunities for information exchange, mobiliza-
(Figure 1B). Comparing the rates of change Challenges and paths forward for
tion, and research. Such changes amplify
pre- and post-takeover, we saw that environmental social media
the need to create collaborations across
the magnitude of the changes were signifi- The rapid decline in active users raises alarm
industry, the non-profit sector, and acade-
cantly larger after Musk’s takeover bells and signifies a substantial loss for the
mia to track public engagement with the
(Table 1). Moreover, the decline in active conservation community, which includes
environment across social media platforms
for the benefit of primary research, applied
environmental conservation, and climate
Table 1. The mean rates of change in the proportion of active users before (Pre) and after (Post) the
Twitter takeover mitigation.
Environmental Politics
Declaration of interests
Time Mean 99% CI Mean 99% CI
period No interests are declared.

Pre –0.299% (–0.301%, –0.297%) –0.099% (–0.104%, –0.098%)

1
Department of Biology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA,
Post –1.72% (–1.74%, –1.70%) –1.08% (–1.10%, –1.06%)
91711, USA

894 Trends in Ecology & Evolution, October 2023, Vol. 38, No. 10
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