Abstract

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk acquired the world’s largest micro-blogging platform, Twitter. As a self-proclaimed ``free speech absolutist’’, this was a controversial and highly publicised event. The acquisition led to a series of chaotic events. As a consequence, Twitter experienced a mass migration of users. One of the recipient platforms has been Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging service. This presentation will discuss our measurements of the migration.

Bio: Gareth Tyson is an Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He regularly publishes in venues such as SIGCOMM , SIGMETRICS, WWW , INFOCOM, CoNEXT and IMC , alongside various top-tier IEEE /ACM Transactions. Over the last 5 years, he has been awarded over £5 million in research funding and has received coverage from news outlets such as BBC , Washington Post, CNBC , New Scientist, MIT Tech Review, The Times, Slashdot, Daily Mail, Wired, Science Daily, Ars Technica, The Independent, Business Insider, The Register, as well as being interviewed on both TV and Radio. He regularly serves on numerous organising and program committee member for conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM , ACM SIGMETRICS , ACM IMC , ACM WWW , ACM CoNEXT, IEEE ICDCS and AAAI ICWSM .