American Scientist

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, and things went downhill fast. As of this writing, we don’t really know if Twitter will survive the next few months, and if it does, what form it will take. It may be brought down by the loss of advertising revenue that was keeping it financially afloat, or by Apple removing it from the App Store for violating their terms and conditions. It may continue to exist as a hollowed-out husk as all the interesting people leave because they don’t want to experience harassment or threats, or to support a business that chooses to allow harmful misinformation to flourish. It may simply stop working because the people keeping things running were impulsively fired. Maybe things will start getting better, and everything will work out. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. One thing seems certain: Many of Science Twitter’s most active users are acting as if we are in the last days of this vibrant community that has meant so much to many of us.

For people who aren’t Very Online, it can be difficult to understand why so many people seem so distressed about the (possible but seemingly increasingly likely) loss of a website we all complained about regularly. Twitter’s many problems are well-documented, but its strengths perhaps less so. As with many of Twitter’s “main characters,” Twitter slang for the often-bizarre issue everyone was discussing that day, it can be difficult to explain why something like this social media community mattered. But as one of Twitter’s most-followed scientists, a professional development workshop trainer who taught nearly 1,000 early career scientists how to use twitter, and a scholar of online public science engagement, I’d like to try.

At its best, Twitter has been the world’s most interesting cocktail party. It allowed anyone to get into any corner they liked and have fascinating conversations with the world’s leading experts on just about any topic they could imagine, including topics we never even thought about before we saw people discussing them. Because of Twitter, I learned something and thought about something new and (at least a little bit) interesting almost every single day since I signed up in 2009. Sometimes I learned from a famous scholar or artist or investigative journalist, sometimes from a student or an activist working on an issue I’d never heard of.

Twitter has been a powerful place to find and build community. Many scientists love conferences because we’re the only ones at our institutions who study a particular topic, which means being around others in our field for a few days each year lets us geek out about the niche topics we care about the most. Finding our own little corners of Science Twitter meant that we could geek out about our favorite things any time we wanted, which also led to amazing new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborations from people who met through Twitter. I’ve never met the other authors on my most-cited paper in real life, I know them only from Twitter!

Science Twitter not only lets us geek out about whatever we want, like the best parts of a conference, it also lets us invite others to join us without them having to travel to that conference. For scientists who often struggle with the social isolation of our friends and family not really understanding what we do for a living, being able to invite loved ones to join us on these journeys has been a beautiful way to connect. During the early days of the pandemic, when access to our real-life communities was cut off, having a virtual community to interact with saved the sanity of many, including me.

Science Twitter not only built virtual communities, but also was vital in building movements to fix our real-world communities. #MeTooSTEM brought (or at least started to bring) much needed changes to toxic workplace cultures in academia. It was the birthplace of organizations and movements promoting diversity in STEM like Black Birders Week, which led to countless spinoffs, including in my corner of science, Black in Marine Science and Minorities in Shark Sciences (the four founders of which met on Twitter). My field is better because these organizations exist, and these organizations exist in no small part because of Twitter.

Twitter has also been an important tool for explaining science to the public and for humanizing scientists. Most members of the public don’t read scientific journal articles or attend conferences, but lots of people love learning about issues that affect us all, or fun facts about the world around us from talented storytellers. Because of tools such as Twitter, it’s never been easier in the entire history of human civilization for an expert to share their expertise with the interested public on scales that were beyond the wildest dreams of scientists just a few years ago. Twitter has also been incredibly useful at connecting scientists with journalists, who use Twitter to find story tips and sources, allowing strategic experts to amplify their message even further.

Informal learning from Twitter can also take place in a classroom setting! For the past few years, I’ve had my undergraduate students sign up for a Twitter account and follow scientists from a carefully curated list. Each week, I asked them to log on for a few minutes and report on something neat they learned. My students loved learning directly from experts on the front lines of scientific discovery, rather than reading an impersonal summary of some of their work years later in a textbook.

Twitter has been a great place to find out about jobs, grants, and professional development opportunities. My Twitter network told me about job opportunities, such as the postdoc in conservation leadership that gave me the skills and network to start a science communication consulting firm, as well as freelance journalism opportunities that allowed me to financially survive as a graduate student—including opportunities to write for this very magazine. Those writing opportunities led to writing my book that came out earlier this year, Why Sharks Matter, and the connections I made through Twitter allowed me to organize a 50-city book tour.

The skills I’ve learned from my time on Science Twitter and the people I’ve met there have had a huge impact on my professional life. Learning about other research in my field and related fields has made me a better scientist and a better collaborator. Learning how to explain complex scientific concepts in 140 (and then eventually 280) characters has made me a better teacher and writer. Learning from people that weren’t given a platform elsewhere in my professional life has made me a better listener and a better ally for marginalized communities within my field. To paraphrase a friend, I have no desire to be “famous,” but I’d like to gain enough power and influence to help make my field a better place, and Twitter has been a very effective tool in service of that goal.

Some people have remarked that the (possible, seemingly increasingly likely) demise of Twitter feels like losing a friend. It does, but it also feels like losing a beloved and trusted mentor. It has been one of the best places to make new friends and find new mentors, and one of the best tools for helping to make my field a better place for everyone. It feels like losing a fun place to hang out and learn, and a great way to teach the public and my students. And no, I don’t think any of the currently-discussed Twitter alternatives like Post.News, Mastodon, or Hive can come anywhere close to replacing Twitter as a public science engagement tool.

If we lose Science Twitter, we don’t lose everything. But we lose a lot.