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”.

  • psycho_driver@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    4 months ago

    The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.devEnglish
      81·
      4 months ago

      And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

    • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      I remember that /r/all was actually pretty educational back in the day. There were specific users that you would know by their user names that always posted something insightful.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Oh, that’s when I first saw that place. Left surprised that there are still normal forums in the interwebs.

      • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        It got much, much worse a few years after that. I was amazed to see my first “conservative” on reddit.

      • NostraDavid@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        I blame Digg for failing. It increased Reddit’s popularity too fast, which was a bad thing bringing too many people, fucking up the culture reddit had built (which wasn’t much, but it was ours).

        • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
          51·
          4 months ago

          Oh man, in 2024 I never thought I’d see some Reddit oldhead still complaining about the eternal September following Digg’s fall…