Facebook and Threads a ‘waste of time’ for spreading research

Twitter is ‘like wandering around in a noisy nightclub yelling at each other’, says ANU professor.

Inger Mewburn. Picture: Aaron Francis/The Australian

Universities should stop encouraging academics to use social media to spread their research, according to an Australian National University professor who coaches researchers on how to use Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

And while the new Mark Zuckerberg platform, Threads, is “mind-numbingly engaging”, it’s not going to help academics amplify their work in its current state, says Professor Inger Mewburn.

She used to be fully immersed into social media, but this week her online post arguing that “the system’s rigged” went viral as her followers latched on to her backflip.

From Cambridge, where she is on sabbatical, Mewburn, 53, says the latest offering on her 10-year-old blog, The Thesis Whisperer, doesn’t mean she’s given up on social media.

“I’m still on there,” she says. “I’m just weary of multiple platforms.”

Weary, too, of the “enshittification” of social media in which algorithms determine who will see your posts unless you “pay to play”.

“The numbers on Twitter and Facebook don’t measure what you think they measure; likes and follows are virtually worthless because of enshittification,” Mewburn says.

She writes that “social media has fully completed what Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call ‘The Enshittification cycle’ ”.

“It’s a concept fully explained in their excellent book, Chokepoint Capitalism, but here’s the nub of the argument, as Doctorow puts it in an excellent article about TikTok in Wired magazine: ‘Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die’,” she says.

“It’s no longer true you can build a substantial audience by doing Good Work and telling people about it.

“Today, you can talk about your research on social media platforms all you want, but hardly anyone will hear you unless you pay cash money. Facebook has been functionally useless as a way for me to promote my work for about eight years. I’m lucky if 300 people out of my over 27,000 follower base see a post unless I pay the Meta landlord.”

Mewburn says she now has three Twitter-like platforms – Mastodon, BlueSky and Threads – on her phone as well as Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.

“We must be clear-eyed about the opportunity costs of social media engagement for researchers – both individuals and groups,” she writes in her blog.

“Stop wasting people’s time and find other ways to further your ‘impact agenda’. Let people get on with The Work – whatever that means for them.”

Mewburn’s role at ANU involves helping academics communicate with the public, to write faster and produce more papers.

There is an expectation on academics that their research will have an impact, and social media has been seen as one of the cheapest ways to spread the word, she says. As well, research shows more social media increases the all-important academic citations of work by other academics. But it’s time-consuming to maintain a real presence on multiple channels, which is increasingly necessary as the algorithms control visibility.

“You only have so much energy for that. So, you have just got to pick the channel that you enjoy engaging in, talk to people there and just broadcast on everything else,” Mewburn says.

She’d love to return to Twitter as it operated in 2010, just four years after it launched and before the algorithms ruled the world of social.

“You just want to see the people that you follow, and when you don’t see what they say and you don’t see what they say in the order they say it, then you can’t really carry on a conversation,” Mewburn says. “It’s like wandering around in a really noisy nightclub just yelling at each other.”

For a time now, social media companies have been “stoking outrage because that keeps eyes on platform, that keep eyes on ads that keeps them in business”, she argues.

Then TikTok broke the model because it made everyone happy, and now Threads is “trying to do Twitter with TikTok sensibility”.

“It’s successful and mind-numbingly engaging, but Threads will not work well as a disperser of academic research in its current form … because it’s random.”

Mewburn says many researchers have been taught that social media is the way to get ahead.

“I’ve been guilty of telling that story to people, and it’s been true in the past,” she says. “But now it’s not so true because you really can’t get there unless you pay. So part of my message in the post to early-career academics is to say, ‘Hey, the system’s rigged’.”

In her blog, Mewburn says: “Telling academics they can achieve career success by using today’s algorithmic-driven platforms is like telling millennials they could afford to buy a house by eating less avocado on toast. It’s a cruel lie … once the work is on a platform, it’s a crapshoot whether someone sees it, with the possible exception of Mastodon.”

She says social media may build brand awareness, but “individual schools and units, like the one I work in, should not waste their time. And Twitter is an unsafe, Nazi-troll invested, transphobic hellscape. Making people engage on Twitter, at least right now, is both unethical and unsafe.

“I give the same advice about social media to academics as I do to women asking what to wear. Do whatever the hell you want.

“Share your work – or not. If you share it, stop worrying about click- throughs and views as you have little control over who will see it unless you pay. If you invest more time in building anything to try and ‘increase your reach’, make it a mailing list.

“Email is still the best distribution medium of them all.”