SURF no longer tweets. The ICT cooperative for education is leaving X and opening its own server for education and research on Mastodon. There, users are less bothered by bots, trolls and spam.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and started calling it X, public ‘twexits’, as a farewell to Twitter is sometimes called, have been raining down. Musk would do too little against disinformation and incitement by trolls and fake accounts, his critics think.
SURF, too, has had enough. X no longer aligns with public values such as “humanity, autonomy and justice”, writes the ICT cooperative of Dutch educational institutions in a press release.
Many scientists have already left the platform or are using it less, SURF argues. A spokesperson refers to a recent study by Nature, in which more than half of the scientists surveyed said they tweet less or cancel their accounts.
SURF is switching to the much smaller Mastodon, which is open source and decentralised in nature. On the platform, local administrators themselves largely determine the rules and technology of their own communities.
HOP, Olmo Linthorst
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