MQ School of Social Sciences Discussion Series: What is the future of the Social Sciences on X / Twitter?
Date: 3pm 15 November C122 Arts Precinct
Speaker: Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ben Spies-Butcher, Jessica McLean, Milena Bojovic and Jon Symons
How does a diverse community of scholars working in a School of Social Science in a public university reach a decision on whether they should continue to operate institutional Twitter accounts?
Prior to October 2022 many of us operated Twitter accounts (individually or on behalf of our disciplines) because Twitter’s community of users had created a public resource consisting of exchange of ideas, public critique, sharing of events, and transformative political activism. Positive “network effects” had turned the platform into a public resource and a public space. Although this space was owned by a private company it was accessible to anyone with the opportunity to use communication technologies and the capacity to maintain a digital presence. In October 2022, this business model changed. Under new ownership, a pattern of chauvinist decision-making produced a series of substantive cultural and technical changes that reconstructed the platform. Increasingly, X – as it is now called – seems open to far-right organising and hate-speech. However, despite multiple efforts, there has been no single mass-defection to an alternative space of equivalent generative network effects.
How to respond? Defection risks surrendering a valued ‘public’ resource to reactionary forces. Yet continued participation risks complicity with a company that has abandoned all responsibility for the safety of the site’s users. Our decision-making needs to take account of the costs for destruction of the public good and the communities in which our accounts are enmeshed. In this forum speakers will consider what kind of decisions we think we are making: as social scientists or as employees of the university? Are we showing leadership for our disciplines - which would imply that we are implicitly making a case that others should follow us? Or are we simply managing risk and resources and setting our own priorities? What logics and principles govern this decision? And what solidarities should inform our collective decisions? In short, should we stay or go on X/Twitter, or sit somewhere in between?