Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink
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Tkacz, Nathaniel; Cámara-Menoyo, Carlos and Zhang, Fangzhou. 2025. Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink. New Media & Society, ISSN 1461-4448 [Article] (In Press)
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Abstract or Description
Using the 2022 Twitter to Mastodon migration as a case study, this article contributes a new understanding of social media migration (SMM). It begins with a review of existing studies of SMM, showing how migration is often understood as a combination of ‘push and pull factors’. We suggest a need to widen the conceptual scope for how we approach SMM in ways that more directly tie such movements to specific questions of power, agency and events that ripple through digital cultures. Drawing on social media account analysis, a survey of recently migrated Mastodon users, content from high-profile Twitter users and other media commentaries, we re-present the migration in order to detail our ‘eventful’ theory of migration. Eventful social media migration is comprised of five elements: an initial X factor; the emergence of a critical voice; a collective platform consciousness; an observable migration; and a wider terrain transformation.
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Article |
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| Additional Information: |
Funding: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by the Research Development Fund at the University of Warwick, for the project ‘Researching Platform Migration: Twitter Decline and the Rise of Mastodon’, Jan 2023–July 2023. |
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| Data Access Statement: |
Special consideration has been taken to make the survey dataset easily reusable both from a technical and legal standpoint. The anonymised data used in this survey, as well as its metadata describing variables and methods is published in a public repository accessible with its own DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/734YW as Open Data under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 Licence to favour scrutiny, shareability and reusability. A companion paper explaining methods used in the survey is currently under review at Data In Brief. It should be stressed that only aspects of this survey are relevant and drawn upon in this current submission. |
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| Keywords: |
social media migration, Twitter, Mastodon, push-pull factors, user power |
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| Item ID: |
39420 |
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| Date Deposited: |
20 Aug 2025 12:15 |
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| Last Modified: |
20 Aug 2025 12:15 |
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Peer Reviewed: |
Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed. |
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