It’s No Fun, Watching The EV Social Media Scene Fragment – CleanTechnica

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Despite having some bad history on the platform (getting a strange ban in 2023), X/Twitter has still been a useful platform. Not only are there a still a lot of good people on there, but there’s a lot of good information for articles. It has also been very useful for my project revolving around EVs in national parks.

At the same time, though, I can see why many people are bailing out. With most forms of bigotry and rudeness now tolerated on the platform, it can sometimes be a lot less fun than it used to be. Rules have been unevenly enforced, being used to take down prominent Democratic Party figures at times, while ignoring even the most flagrant of violations from far right figures. Since the election, a huge number of sore winners have emerged, making not only X/Twitter, but also other platforms like Facebook, unpleasant (and sometimes just weird, when some asshat tries to “trigger” people).

But X/Twitter has reacted to the election in a way I didn’t expect: a large number of people simply leaving. I’m calling it the “X-odus.”

I work with thousands of EV fans on both sides of the political divide there, and I’ve lost hundreds of followers. Using tools to track unfollows, I’ve found that most of the people deleted their accounts. Thousands more simply stopped posting or interacting in any way, leaving without deleting or announcing their departure (X/Twitter isn’t an airport). But enough people have told us where they’re going to know that BlueSky and Threads are the most common destinations.

I’m far from the only person who has noticed this. Not only are smaller accounts disappearing, but big names like The Guardian and Don Lemon have announced intention to hit the road. MSNBC talked to people who were leaving and found that the election was the final straw for many. They blame Elon Musk for helping Trump get elected, and it’s something they no longer wish to support or participate in. Others have complained that the “for you” algorithm seems to be skewed toward showing far right talking points and that it has only gotten worse after the election. Other media outlets have also identified new terms and conditions as a second reason many people have left.

Some users have published guides for getting started at BlueSky, like this one that has been floating around a lot:

With the large influx of people moving over to BlueSky, the platform has had its own moderation problems. With more Democrat-leaning people moving over and bad actors following them over to torment them, the number of reports for violations of the TOS have skyrocketed. So, BlueSky is working to add employees and expand moderation teams to enforce the rules.

Further Fragmenting The EV Community

While I completely understand why people are moving to other platforms, and I don’t intend to place blame on them, I am saddened to see that the EV community is becoming even more fragmented.

The fragmentation has already been underway for some time. Because Tesla is still the juggernaut of the EV industry, it only makes sense that many EV fans are also Tesla fans. Many Tesla fans are big fans of Elon Musk, and have followed him into right-wing politics in recent years. So, the EV space has become a place where right-wing views have become more normalized. But many people got into EVs because they were environmentalists, so many people did not follow Musk down this rabbit hole.

The purchase of Twitter led to Elon Musk and people following him politically gaining the upper hand, but this only resulted in a trickle of people to other platforms. This wasn’t enough to really make those alternatives have enough of a network effect to be a viable alternative to X/Twitter. But, with the election results, people are looking to place blame, and Elon Musk has put himself in the middle of efforts to promote Trump. This resulted in many people blaming him for Trump getting back into power, and a general disgust with supporting him in any way outside of perhaps EVs.

What I’m seeing happen now is Democrat-leaning and centrist EV enthusiasts moving off to BlueSky, Threads, and to a smaller extent, the Fediverse (Mastodon, Diaspora, Hubzilla, and various other CMS platforms via plugins). Right-leaning people are either staying on Facebook (which has become a home for elderly illiterates) or X/Twitter.

The bad thing about this schism in the community is that it makes the whole EV community less influential. Instead of being able to live in the same information landscape and work together to achieve our goals, the EV community will now be split into factions that don’t talk to each other most of the time. 

Making Things Challenging For Influencers & Sites Like CleanTechnica

While the whole EV community struggles to unite and get things done, this fragmentation is going to be tough for people who try to be leaders in that community or who try to recruit new people. Search engines are in the process of screwing bloggers and other website-based content creators (including journalists) by either not sending traffic or distilling their work into AI-generated summaries that provide almost zero traffic. Social media sites are also trying to penalize people who rely on web traffic, especially Facebook and X/Twitter. This leaves everyone needing to build up followings not only on a blog, but on every social network to gather everyone they can.

With difficulty developing leadership, communities suffer. This allows not only chaos to develop, but it also allows the wolves to enter the flock and feed on it. I’ve already seen this on Twitter/X, as some people who were once big on things like Tesla and SpaceX become anti-vaxxers, chemtrail conspiracy theorists, and MAGAloids, completely dropping the ball to chase revenue by chasing an algorithm that favors such tripe.

There are ways to get around this, like social media management platforms, automatic sharing of content to multiple social media sites, and playing the copy-paste game to feed content into places like Twitter/X. However, all of this costs creators and thought leaders time and money that they could have spent creating better or more content.

Whether the grass remains greener on the other side of the fence is the big question now. If BlueSky can keep the disinformation, bigotry, abuse, and such down without stifling the conversation, a new core may develop that the EV community can grow around. But, if some corporate interest buys it out to further their own demented politics, or if the platform stifles speech to the point where only Democrat-leaning people feel welcome, this won’t be able to happen.

Featured image: an AI-generated picture of “Twitter bots.”