“I’m leaving because it promotes misinformation”: Plato’s Robot leaves X and joins the exodus from science on the platform

Aldo Bartra, scientific communicator who created the YouTube channel ‘Plato’s Robot’, announced that he will be leaving X, Elon Musk’s social network. Direct interactions with your followers and colleagues will move to Bluesky. Aldo is not alone. He belongs to a large group of users linked to science who have started an exodus from the platform due to the new content guidelines.

“I’m leaving because this is a platform that promotes misinformation, it has no filters against pornography, botscontent that is not interesting, hate speech whether from the left or right and because it is a platform that brings out the worst in people,” Bartra told his 174 thousand followers.

The departure of the scientific community from X

Since acquiring the platform in 2022, Elon Musk proclaimed that the social network would free itself from the chains of censorship. Some of his first actions as the new owner were firing Twitter’s ethics team and naming himself as the sole member of the board of directors. Two years later, the billionaire aligned himself with the policies of now President Donald Trump and their relationship culminated in his appointment as director of the Department of Government Efficiency of the United States government.

X is now a field where ideological fundamentalism proliferates. Furthermore, since it has been possible to monetize content through viralization, profiles have appeared whose sole purpose is to create sensationalist, unverified content. Scientists and disseminators have reduced their spaces and have been forced to pay for visibility. The change in the social network began the search for a new sanctuary for the scientific community to interact informally and casually. For now, that place appears to be Bluesky.

Within the followers of ‘Plato’s Robot’ there are divided opinions about the statement. “If you want freedom and no political censorship, “X boosts posts from accounts with the blue check more (it doesn’t matter if it’s good information or garbage), or if they are controversial posts that have a lot of interaction like this one. So far, the posts I make on Bluesky do reach the people who follow me and that is what matters,” answered Aldo Bartra, with a YouTube channel with almost 3 million subscribers.

Why is Bluesky attractive to academics and popularizers?

In Bluesky, users have complete control of what they see when they open their app. There is a feed to Discover and another to Follow. One shows you content based on your interests and the other only from people you follow. The social network, at the moment, does not send controversial content to arouse emotions in its users, as X does. There are also curated lists of users who upload relevant and verifiable content.

One of the feeds The most popular is Science. This is the section where the scientific community writes and shares content. To be named a contributor, the user must submit their credentials. According to Natureciting the manager of the feed, The section receives 400,000 visits a day and has 3,600 contributorsfrom ecologists to quantum physicists. The numbers rise as more academics and popularizers choose to abandon X.

Bluesky works similarly to X because it was, in fact, an internal Twitter project that became independent before the Elon Musk acquisition. At first it could only be accessed through an invitation system and, after the exodus of X, it opened its doors to those looking for a virtual refuge.