Social media platforms have witnessed a dynamic landscape of user migration in recent years, fueled by changes in ownership, policy, and user preferences. This paper explores the phenomenon of user migration from established platforms like X/Twitter to emerging alternatives such as Threads, Mastodon, and Truth Social. Leveraging a large dataset from X/Twitter, we investigate the extent of user departure from X/Twitter and the destinations they migrate to. Additionally, we examine whether a user's reputation on one platform correlates with their reputation on another, shedding light on the transferability of digital reputation across social media ecosystems. Overall, we find that users with a large following on X/Twitter are more likely to migrate to another platform; and that their reputation on X/Twitter is highly correlated with reputations on Threads, but not Mastodon or Truth Social.
@article{arxiv.2405.12040,
title = {Reputation Transfer in the Twitter Diaspora},
author = {Kristina Radivojevic and DJ Adams and Griffin Laszlo and Felixander Kery and Tim Weninger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12040},
year = {2024}
}