The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

Two New Articles on Shifts from Twitter to its Alternatives

Author Name, 28 Mar 2025

There are two new items in the bibliography!

The journalists’ exodus: Navigating the transition from Twitter to Mastodon and other alternative platforms

Written by Yee Man Margaret Ng and Rick Ray and appearing in New Media and Society, this paper focuses on how journalists reacted to the purchase ot Twitter by Elon Musk. As their abstract states, the authors used

a mixed-method approach that combines computational analysis of the activities of 861 journalists on Twitter and Mastodon with qualitative interviews of 11 active journalists, this study aims to (1) examine the extent to which journalists have exhibited different forms of Twitter disengagement post-acquisition; (2) identify the motivating and discouraging factors influencing their move, guided by the push-pull-mooring model; and (3) explore how journalists managed their online presence across platforms. The results indicated minimal Twitter non-use following Musk’s takeover, and full migration was not observed within a 6-month post-acquisition period.

Moral Entrepreneurs of the Mastodon Migration

While the Ng and Ray study focused on journalists, this Symbolic Interaction paper by Ward et al considers both Twitter and Mastodon as “mediated moral enterprises.” As they put it in their abstract, “Social media platforms are imbued with politics and values through an interplay of coded architectures, platform policies, economic models, and algorithmic curation, together shaping and shaped by the activities of users.” They consider Twitter as a “top-down” moral enteprise – particularly with Musk at the helm – while Mastodon is a more distributed moral enterprise.