Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Marion Schnelle and Deirdre Watchorn. Marion is head of social media at De Gruyter Brill, where she manages the company’s corporate channels and supports dozens of editors in running more than 30 subject accounts. Deirdre is an insights professional with over 20 years’ experience consulting for multinational brands and marketing teams globally, who has led the insights and analysis team at De Gruyter since 2019.

At one time, there was little doubt about where academics gathered to connect with peers, share research, and discover new voices. Platforms like Twitter (now X) offered a vibrant, informal commons: a single, global space where researchers could build reputations, collaborate across borders, and participate in real-time scholarly debate.

But now, that clarity has gone. The digital landscape for academics is fragmented, tiring, and uncertain. While this shift is often framed as a simple migration to newer platforms, the reality is more complex — and the implications for scholarly communication are far-reaching.

A recent research report published by De Gruyter Brill, based on nearly 1,800 scholars worldwide, paints a picture of a community caught in transition. Social media still matters, but for many, it has become a space of pressure, fatigue, and diminishing returns.

The Double Bind

The pressure to be visible online remains strongest for early-career researchers (ECRs). Many still view social media as essential for being seen, cited, and connected — even as they question its value. This creates a bind: a sense of needing to stay active while feeling drained and skeptical about the payoff.

As one respondent put it, “I actively dislike Twitter and Facebook — I considered using them to promote my books, but quickly changed my mind. I still feel I ought to be there for visibility, but it’s exhausting.” Another described becoming “more passive — just following friends, family, and some professional contacts. It feels necessary to stay connected, but I rarely have the energy to contribute.”

For those without established networks — particularly in the Global South — social media has historically been a leveling force. As these spaces fragment, sustaining visibility without that common arena is becoming harder. One respondent summed it up: “Because of the Twitter takeover, I created Mastodon and later Bluesky accounts. I don’t want to be on corporate-driven networks, but I worry I’m missing important conversations.”

The Decline of X and Facebook

The survey found that 67% of regular social media users had reduced their time on the platforms, with many abandoning X and Facebook entirely. The reasons are familiar: toxicity, declining professional value, and algorithmic changes that deprioritize academic content.

Nearly half of respondents (49%) said these platforms had become too hostile for meaningful academic exchange, discouraging participation in debates and making it harder to discover new work. As one put it, “As the quality of X has declined, I have used it less. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives is sufficiently populated by colleagues to be useful to me.”

The demise of ‘academic Twitter’ as a trusted, constructive space represents more than a nostalgic loss — it removes a key route for collaboration, sharing research, calls for papers, and events across disciplines.

At the same time, LinkedIn has become more prominent. While it is not yet part of most researchers’ daily routines, it is now the third most-used platform in our data — and the leading one for work-related activity. Some respondents described shifting their professional networking and science communication there, particularly as X has lost ground: “I have shifted from Twitter to LinkedIn and LinkedIn is really a very good platform for science.” For many, LinkedIn is less about everyday discourse and more about targeted opportunities: peer connections, professional development, and job searching.

Fragmentation and the Workload Gap

In the absence of a single dominant platform, our study finds that activity is splintering. Some academics are experimenting with Bluesky, Mastodon, or even Substack. Engagement levels in these spaces can be high — sometimes higher than on legacy platforms — but their reach is limited.

For individuals, institutions, and publishers alike, this creates a new kind of pressure: the need to track multiple channels, rebuild networks, and adapt to different cultures of interaction. Senior academics can often lean on established reputations and personal networks. For ECRs and researchers in the Global South, the effort to maintain visibility is greater — and the time, energy, and resources to do so are not evenly distributed.

The Return to Controlled Channels

Perhaps the most striking finding is the quiet resurgence of older, more controlled, and perhaps more trusted forms of communication. Email, newsletters, peer networks, and ‘in real life’ events are reclaiming space once ceded to social media. “I prefer email and in-person contact,” said one researcher, “social media is too chaotic to be productive.”

Three-quarters of respondents preferred receiving email or newsletters from publishers, compared to just 41% who favored social media. For many, these channels offer a sense of control, relevance, and community — even if they lack the instant reach and serendipity of the big social media platforms.

The Emotional Toll

The research also reveals the emotional costs of constant connection. Respondents spoke of anxiety and the ‘performative’ nature of maintaining a professional presence online. One commented, “I’ve become more conscious in managing my screen time… it’s necessary for my career, but it’s exhausting to keep up.”

This strain is not just a personal well-being issue — it shapes the health of scholarly communication. If fatigue pushes people away from informal networks, the ecosystem loses diversity, vibrancy, and reach.

What This Means for Scholarly Communications

These findings point to more than a change in personal habits. They suggest a reconfiguration of how research is informally shared and discovered — with potentially profound consequences. The once-reliable routes for circulating research, spotting emerging trends, and connecting across disciplines are slowing down. Without shared spaces, visibility risks becoming uneven, with early-career and underrepresented scholars most likely to lose out.

For publishers, societies, and institutions, the loss of these open, centralized venues also means the loss of an important communication channel. Academic Twitter was never perfect, but it allowed organizations to see where conversations were happening, where communities were forming, and where needs were emerging. In a more fragmented environment, those signals are harder to detect, and the work of maintaining connections is greater. This shift also raises questions for the communications professionals who were hired to monitor and build networks on these platforms: how their roles evolve as usage patterns change remains an open question.

Fragmentation itself is not necessarily a bad thing — niche platforms can foster deeper, more focused communities. But for individual researchers, keeping a foot in multiple spaces comes at a cost, and for the scholarly ecosystem as a whole, it dilutes reach and weakens the serendipity that once characterized online exchange. This leaves the scholarly communications community facing an urgent question: if the old ‘commons’ is breaking down, what comes next?

Where To Next?

The answer is unlikely to be a single platform replacing Twitter. More realistic is a patchwork of channels: listservs, newsletters, Substack, and community-driven tools that provide continuity across spaces. None of these alone will recreate the reach of the old platforms, but together they point to a different kind of ecosystem — smaller, more distributed, and potentially more resilient.

In this new landscape, the task for publishers, societies, and institutions is not to reinvent social media, but to recognize and support the models that already exist. That means valuing multiple forms of visibility — through email, newsletters, conferences, or niche communities — and reducing the burden on individual researchers, particularly those without established networks, who cannot be ‘everywhere at once.’ Much of this activity is already scholar-led, which makes it even more important for publishers to listen carefully and respond to the needs of research communities.

Those organizations that step forward to sustain these emerging models will play a defining role in how scholarship is shared and discovered in the years ahead.