During the COVID-19 pandemic with lockdown mandates and social distancing, doctors, researchers, and the public were able to find refuge and community online; for the infectious disease community, it was on the social media platform Twitter, and more specifically under the widely used hashtag, #IDTwitter. Under new ownership from 2022, however, Twitter’s name and brand changed to what we now know as X, and the “heyday of #IDtwitter is long since gone”. In this special episode of Communicable, Angela Huttner and Marc Bonten invite doctors and science communicators, Neil Stone, Ilan Schwartz, and Tara Smith to debate whether we should stay on X or leave it for alternatives.
Hostettler et al. (2026) studied this question.