The tone and expression of academics on X (or Twitter)

In my previous post, I highlighted the apparent contribution of X (formerly Twitter) to toxicity on the Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) website. A natural follow-up question is whether and to what extent academics on X contribute to the toxicity on that platform and, by extension, to other forums such as EJMR. This recent article by Prashant Garg (Imperial College London) and Thiemo Fetzer (University of Warwick), published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour (open access), goes some way towards providing an answer.

Garg and Fetzer constructed a dataset of nearly 100,000 academics, including all of their Twitter [*] activity from 2016 to 2022. They then use large language models (ChatGPT-3.5 and GPT-4) to characterise each tweet in relation to content and tone. They assess each academic's stance on climate change, economic policy, and cultural issues. In terms of tone, they measure egocentrism (how often the academic refers to themselves in the first person), toxicity (based on the probability a tweet is classified as toxic by Google's Perspective API), and the balance between reason and emotion (measured as a ratio of 'affective terms' to 'cognitive terms' based on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool). The analysis is then largely descriptive, but nonetheless interesting.

Garg and Fetzer first find that:

...leading academics are not typically social media influencers... We found weak correlations between citation counts and Twitter metrics: citations and likes... citations and followers... and citations and content creation...

Garg and Fetzer observe that:

The weak correlation underscores that many prominent public intellectuals online gain visibility through public engagement rather than scholarly achievements, often holding lower academic credentials while commanding significant public attention, thus widening the gap between social media influencers and established academic experts.

I think that Garg and Fetzer overstate the case here. The weak correlations suggest that Twitter includes a cross-section of academics (in terms of academic quality), rather than that the top academics eschew Twitter (which would instead lead to negative correlations between measures of academic quality and Twitter engagement).

I'll put aside their results on political expression, which I round rather uninteresting. In contrast, the results in terms of tone demonstrate some interesting correlations. First, in terms of egocentrism (using self-referential terms such as 'I', 'me', 'my', and 'myself'):

Female academics... exhibit higher egocentrism than male academics...

Egocentrism increases with university ranking: academics at top-100 institutions... exhibit higher egocentrism than those from institutions ranked 101-500... US-based academics... show higher egocentrism than non-US academics

Then, in terms of toxicity:

Academics with high reach but low academic credibility... exhibit lower toxicity than those with the contrasting profile, that is, ones with low reach but high credibility...

Academics at top-100 universities... exhibit higher toxicity than those at institutions ranked 101-500... Moreover, US-based academics... exhibit higher toxicity than non-US academics...

And in terms of emotionality (or reason):

Emotionality is significantly higher among female academics... than male academics... In terms of reach and credibility, high-reach/low-credibility scholars... show significantly higher emotionality than low-reach/high-credibility scholars...

Finally, US-based academics... exhibit higher emotionality than non-US scholars...

Many of those differences will surprise no one, such as US-based academics being more egocentric and toxic in their expression on Twitter. Other differences seem to confirm familiar stereotypes, such as female academics using more emotional language than male academics. No doubt, some of the differences relate to differences in norms across different disciplines in terms of communication styles (both on Twitter and in general academic discourse). Garg and Fetzer don't control those other factors that might affect tone and expression. And before we get carried away about how toxic academics are on Twitter, Garg and Fetzer provide an important comparison with the general population. From Figure 6 in the paper:

Notice that academics (the blue line) exhibit far less toxicity (in the graph in the top middle) than the general population of Twitter users (the red line). Moreover, the trend in toxicity is downwards (for academics over the whole period from 2016 to 2023, and for the general population from 2021 to 2023). So, academics are not the main problem in terms of toxicity in the discourse on Twitter.

Nevertheless, there are important differences across academics, and one difference in particular stands out. Academics with high reach (those that are very active on Twitter) but low academic credibility (they are not highly credible academics, as measured by citations) exhibit less toxic expression on Twitter than other academics, particularly those who have low reach but high academic credibility. In their conclusion, Garg and Fetzer focus on this as a problem because:

...those with the greatest public reach may not represent top scholars, potentially distorting public perceptions

However, I see the opposite problem. In terms of tone, the top scholars with the lowest reach have the most toxic expression. Are those the sorts of academics that we want to promote even further on social media? I would suggest not.

What is a better option? First, more highly credible academics should be encouraged to engage in the social media discourse. However, it is important to recognise that credibility alone is not enough. What is needed are credible academics who also model constructive discourse without the toxicity, raising the standard of debate. However, as noted in yesterday's post, many high-quality (especially female) scholars are targets of hostility on social media. These are not separate issues.

Alternatively, we could raise the standard of academic discourse on Twitter more generally, without changing who is represented on the platform. That would reduce the toxic nature of the interactions. Stop laughing! It could happen. The tone and expression of academics on X (or Twitter) matters. Academics can set the standards for everyone else. We don't need to descend into the toxic culture wars that play out each day on social media. We are better than that, and if we show ourselves to be such, maybe more people will listen.

[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]

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[*] I refer to the platform mostly as Twitter, because it didn't change names to X until July 2023, after Garg and Fetzer's dataset ends.