Universities Should Abandon X

Like many other academic institutions, my university is currently considering whether to cease posting on X. Last week, I participated in a panel discussion on “the evolving dynamics of tech companies’ roles in shaping online communication” and whether X was still a channel worth using. As an expert in media economics and the effects of shifting platform dynamics, my position is that the university should quit the platform — and furthermore, that they should think seriously about their goals and strategies before joining an X replacement like Bluesky.

The proximate cause of these discussions is, of course, Elon Musk. In a recently published paper, my co-author Jim Bisbee and I established that the flight from X among individual social scientists began in earnest in the fall of 2022 when Musk acquired Twitter and allowed Donald Trump and the owners of other previously banned accounts back onto the platform. The open alliance between Musk and Trump, as well as Musk’s continuing degradation of the platform’s basic functionality by boosting posts from paying users and encouraging rage-bait bad-faith engagement by paying posters for going viral, has furthered this trend toward abandoning X, which extends to journalists and even, potentially, Democratic Party politicians.

To be clear: Elon Musk is an enemy of institutions of higher education and the values we stand for. His political program involves discrediting and defunding the regulatory apparatus, including the experts required to make governance effective. Every tweet only makes him stronger. It’s not really about the money; he has enough to burn a few billion. It’s about the legitimacy. It has long been clear that we — the legacy institutions entrusted with social and cultural status and regulatory power — are the gold mine into which the clown car crashed, to appropriate Mark Zuckerberg’s famous description of Twitter. The public has become accustomed to using the platform to encounter official communication by government services from the national parks to emergency weather services, as well as information from institutions of higher education. The fact that these nonpartisan entities are confronted with a fully partisan communication environment is the cause of the current crisis.

But Musk’s purchase and control of Twitter for his own political ends shouldn’t be shocking. This was a predictable realization of the latent problem of allowing for-profit corporations to set the protocol for communication on the internet.

Twenty years ago, social-media companies started telling us: “Hey, use this free digital media product!” We individually used it, or didn’t. As time went on and social pressure increased, more and more of us used it because we felt that we had to. I’ve spoken to several early-career scholars who felt that using X for self-promotion was essential for their careers, even as they found their interactions on the platform unpleasant or even dangerous. If we were to design a digital system for professional academic communication from scratch, it’s unlikely that it would involve a platform open to trolling and racist and sexist harassment. But we didn’t design it from scratch; we accepted what we were offered, apparently for free.

In their 2024 book The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy analyze the dynamics of social media using a classic example of sociological theory. They apply Marcel Mauss’s idea of “the gift” as a powerful and potentially destabilizing social technology. Unlike a market exchange in which both sides of a transaction are, in principle, even, gifts leave the receiver in debt to the giver. The free communication offered by social media puts us in a tenuous social position. If we were customers, paying for a service, we could more easily think about costs and benefits, and have recourse to legal protections. But as giftees, we have no bargaining power. Who wants to look a gift horse in the mouth? Our only choice is whether to keep on receiving or to say “no thanks.”

Moreover, the quantified feedback provided by social-media platforms is both seductive and addictive. So many corporate, governmental, and nonprofit organizations have been tricked by ever-increasing view counts into thinking that they’re communicating better — while, on an ecosystem level, it’s clear that our status and capacity has been diminishing every year. Competing for marginal “views” with charlatans like Andrew Tate is a net negative; it damages our reputation for excellence. By commodifying our output, by accepting the platform protocols which treat our scientific or institutional communication exactly the same as trolls and hucksters, we are reducing ourselves to their level.

This is, I acknowledge, an elitist position — but some degree of elitism is inevitable when you’re in the business of expertise. Academe’s position in society is premised on the value of rigorously curated knowledge. As we push the limits of natural science, as we make sense of the social world, and as we impart this knowledge to younger generations, the only justification for asking our fellow citizens to let us dress up in fancy robes and call each other “Doctor” is that this is part of a higher level of epistemic inquiry.

If we want to be in the business of public-facing communication, we need to invest in high-quality digital real estate. Concretely, we need to develop “places” (apps, websites, even physical public spaces) that are persistent attractors for people who are actually interested in the kind of communication that only academics can produce. This means doubling down on our core value proposition. Chasing short-term audience maximization diminishes our unique contributions.

One concrete change academic institutions can make is to recognize that video is not merely the future but the present of digital communication. Academics are constitutionally committed to the technology of the written word, which remains essential for specialized, rigorous knowledge work. But written language has never been the preference of the majority of people’s communication. Humans are easily socialized into the world of speaking with each other; writing comes far less naturally. The fact that so many young people are turning to videos on YouTube and TikTok for information reflects the reality of their experience of the world — and seriously calls into question the value of text-based platforms like X — or Bluesky, for that matter.

What should we be doing, to reach people where they are? Some lessons can be found in the past. High-profile seminars delivered by academics were a major part of public life during the heyday of broadcast media; some of the best are the Massey Lectures, broadcast nationwide by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the 1973 lecture by Stafford Beer is my favorite) and the Reith Lectures broadcast by the BBC in the U.K. Note that both of these come from countries with publicly funded media companies. While several U.S. universities host annual lecture series, the best American analogue is probably something like TED Talks, which frequently feature academics but which have something of a reputation for being glib and flashy rather than substantive. While these have indeed proved to be a popular and effective means of public communication, the issue of relying on a single organization remains, and the heyday of TED seems to be behind it.

Institutions of higher learning who are rethinking their communications strategy in the wake of Trump’s victory should consider investing in high-status, high-quality public lectures highlighting the expertise that we have worked so hard to come by. Not every institution needs to spend money on internet-wide communications. The Gift of Twitter lulled us into thinking this was both essential and low-cost. But a perfunctory online presence can do more reputational harm than good. For institutions with a budget, it makes more sense to invest in digital real estate they own, and to communicate in the modality which is most relevant to the majority of the public: video.

It is essential that the videos be well-produced and technically accessible; merely recording a Zoom seminar and sticking it on YouTube won’t cut it. We should embrace modern communication modalities, combining these lectures with moderated livestreams and digital breakout rooms that allow the public to participate in real time. This higher-effort kind of public communication needs to be formally recognized by the administration, giving professors the proper incentive to invest just as much time into developing and refining this work as we put into peer-reviewed publications.

The most pressing question for many academics and academic institutions right now is “what will replace Twitter”? But nothing has to replace Twitter. We’ve been conditioned, by the power of The Gift, to use the internet in this one specific way. But the internet is a communication revolution that is continuing to unfold. Its potential, at both an individual and a collective level, is massive. We cannot be satisfied with using it only in ways that tech billionaires find most convenient for selling ads, or for selling presidents.