Social Influence in the Academic Twitter Migration to Mastodon: A Computational Psychology Approach

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, and the changes to the platform that came with it, started the so-called #TwitterMigration: Many users called for leaving Twitter and using alternative platforms like Mastodon. Applying social impact theory, we hypothesize that academics on Twitter are more likely to migrate to Mastodon if they are under high social influence from #TwitterMigration influencers. We also hypothesize that researchers who endorse the open science movement are more likely to migrate to Mastodon than researchers who do not. We use an available dataset of around 500,000 researchers on Twitter, as well as lists of researcher accounts on Twitter and Mastodon. We identify additional researchers on Mastodon. For each researcher with posts related to #TwitterMigration, we compute an influence score. Open science advocates are identified using natural language processing. Based on account activity on both platforms, we identify users who have migrated to Mastodon.

After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, many academics called for leaving Twitter and using alternative platforms such as Mastodon. Applying social impact theory, we hypothesize that academics on Twitter are more likely to migrate to Mastodon if they are under high social influence from #TwitterMigration influencers in their academic social network. We also hypothesize that researchers who endorse the open science movement are more likely to migrate to Mastodon than researchers who do not. We use an available dataset of nearly 500,000 researchers on Twitter and openly available account lists. This research-in-progress aims to determine the persuasive effect of academic influencers on the behavior of the research community, with implications for the dissemination and implementation of scientific practices and reforms.