Quartz reports:

Scientists and environmental activists have been fleeing Twitter—now called X—after Elon Musk bought the social platform and took a wrecking ball to its innards.

A study (pdf) published in a journal called Trends in Evolution and Ecology on Aug.15 showed, that out of a sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented X users, “nearly 50% became inactive” after Musk’s acquisition. This rate, the researchers found, was “much higher than a control sample.” By April 2023, only 52.5% of sampled environmental activists on X were still active.

The study was conducted between Dec. 2022 and May 2023. Days after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was concluded on Oct. 22, 2022, analysts reported that more than one million users were no longer active on the platform, a doubling of the previous baseline. The outmigration continued with the arrival of X’s rival, Meta’s Threads—and among those leaving, as the study discovered, were thousands of vocal environmentalists. [Continue reading…]