Oba Babs-Osibodu

Par for the course here, sadly.

I am yet to see a platform that consistently stimulates good faith, measured discussions and information sharing at a large scale, without resorting to extremely heavy-handed policies that hamper the user experience.

Time will tell...

I’m hopeful for Bluesky, but I do think it's in a honeymoon phase. I’ve been using social media pretty much since its inception. I’ve seen many social media platforms come and go...

This doesn't make me angry. I'm just disappointed by the wasted potential and highly concerned about the direction of travel.

X/Twitter has around 250 million daily users and its influence can't be overstated. I believe the site could be harmful to society on a scale we've never seen before.

Essentially, X/Twitter now feels less like a town hall and more like a chaotic and sinister stock market for outrage and disinformation.

For what it's worth, I also think we need to improve media literacy across the board.

In my opinion, a lot of the prominent fake content that misleads people should easily be discerned from real content, but we have failed to educate ourselves as a society.

Bot accounts also flood the replies of every post with complete nonsense and irrelevant content. The prioritisation of paid-for "verified" accounts exacerbates all of these issue.

ChatGPT/LLM bots are starting to dominate the site. I’ve even seen some bots posing as doctors, then being amplified by prominent "medtwitter" users that can't tell them apart from real people.

This technology is only going to improve over time - what's the plan?

The rise of generative AI has made the spread of this misinformation even easier and more insidious. Fake content now looks more polished and can be churned out extremely quickly.

The monetisation of posts makes all of this worse. People are incentivised to post inflammatory content to maximise engagement for financial gain.

"The truth" doesn't really matter when more likes, retweets and replies will come get people a bigger paycheque.

Also, misinformation and disinformation are completely out of control. Community notes is a good idea in theory and works at times, but it's clearly not effective enough.

Falsehoods spread so fast and so wide. I've had multiple real life conversations with people who have fallen for these lies.

I love hearing opposing viewpoints and different ideologies, but the site has become a breeding ground of hate. I regularly see racist/neo-Nazi accounts and posts.

These are not only left unremoved/unbanned, but they are even sometimes actively signal-boosted by Elon Musk to over 200m+ followers.

I joined X/Twitter just under 2 years ago.

Initially, I joined just to post about our pay restoration campaign and perhaps connect with a few other doctors. I quickly found myself using it almost every day. It's shocking how much the platform has deteriorated in such a short timeframe...