Research project
OpenPortability is a research project of the Macroscopes axis of the Institut des Systèmes Complexes de Paris ÎdF (ISC-PIF, CNRS) whose focus since 2015 has been the analysis of socio-semantic dynamics on social networks and in particular Twitter/X.
The ISC-PIF’s Macroscopes have enabled us to highlight profound, long-term changes in digital community structures and associated debates on themes as diverse as political activism in France (Politoscope project), international debates on global warming and biodiversity (Climatoscope project) or the COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, Politoscope documented the fragmentation and shift towards the extremes of the political spectrum, of the French political twittersphere between 2016 and 2022. This fragmentation and shift occurred alongside the emergence of three new digital communities, those of La République en Marche, Reconquête! and a highly cohesive anti-system/anti-elite digital community positioned between La France Insoumise and the Reconquête! bloc. – Rassemblement National bloc.
The particularity of OpenPortability, in this axis, is to integrate a data donation platform whose aim is to observe and quantify the ongoing reconfiguration of digital communities and their use of social networks. It consists in sharing with the ISC-PIF the subscription/subscriber links that users have on X in exchange of a portability service. Those data will enable the research project to reconstruct part of X’s social landscape. This data is public on users’ profile pages, but cannot be collected automatically.
Evolution of the political twittosphere between 2016 and 2022. Between 2016 and 2023, the Politoscope project documented the shift of the French political twittersphere towards the far right. This shift occurred in parallel with a collapse of the traditional parties (PS and LR), which, after dominating the political scene for several decades, garnered 4.78% and 1.75% of the vote respectively in the 2022 presidential election. While the far-right bloc (RN + Reconquête!) garnered over 30% in the first round and 41.45% in the second round, the far-right bloc (RN+Reconquête+Patriotes) accounted for 40.72% of the accounts in the heart of the digital political communities in the 2022 landscape. In these images, each dot is a Twitter/X account. Links are retweet links. Colors represent communities in the retweets graph that overlap predominantly with political activism communities. Further details of this analysis can be found on the Politoscope website. For methodology, see Politoscope.org and Toxic Data, Comment les Réseaux Manipulent nos Opinions, Chavalarias, 2022 (in paperback 2023).
In recent years, the Macroscopes axis has turned its attention to new decentralized digital infrastructures, notably with the launch of a debate observatory on the Mastodon ecosystem as part of the European NODES project. As they are based on open protocols, the new decentralized environments represent unique challenges and opportunities for research, around issues such as the analysis of disinformation processes, foreign interference and the fight against it, or the improvement of public debate and collective decision-making.
The academic world can be a driving force behind the organization of these digital spaces, making them a terrain for social observation and empirical studies thanks to APIs. This was possible on Twitter until its transformation into X and the closure of its APIs, which explains the interest shown by social network scientists in studying Twitter from the outset. In line with the 2024 European roadmap “Toward a research agenda on digital media and humanity well-being” (Ch. 9 Digital Common, Topic 2 “Supporting the development and the sustainability of commons-based citizen platforms”), the ISC-PIF is studying how these new open and decentralized ecosystems build the conditions for a more civically and socially balanced public debate than closed environments.
2025 – the year of the reconfiguration of our information spaces
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we’ve been witnessing a different kind of reconfiguration in social networking usage. This reconfiguration is the result of the coupling of two phenomena involving the micro-blogging network X(ex-Twitter), which was previously at the center of the international media space:
the radical change in the nature of Twitter’s infrastructure under Elon Musk, symbolized by its name change to X and its owner’s involvement with the Trump administration;
the emergence of alternative micro-blogging social networks based on new technologies and open-source software.
Twitter changed its nature by becoming X
Since its takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter, renamed X, has changed its nature. X’s algorithms have been radically overhauled, increasing the network’s algorithmic negativity bias from 32% to 49% by 2023 (the level of toxic content in users’ news feeds relative to what they request via their subscriptions, see Chavalarias 2022 Toxic Data). Moderation teams have been cut to the bone, and the policy of combating misinformation about the covid-19 pandemic has been suspended. Certification of an account’s authenticity on X has been recycled to indicate that an account has paid to gain visibility on X. Accounts previously banned for, for example, incitement to violence or homophobia were reinstated, while at the same time several accounts of influencers, journalists or political opponents were closed without notice.
Messages from Elon Musk and Donald Trump supporters were specifically highlighted to users, significantly altering the visibility of certain information on this network. For example, with its 200 million subscribers, Musk’s political messages amassed over 17 billion views during Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024 – more than twice the number of views of all political ads on X over the same period.
Finally, since February 2023, X has closed down free access to all its APIs, which had made it a successful digital ecosystem since its creation in 2006, enabling researchers to analyze, and watchdogs and fact-checkers to alert on disinformation campaigns and foreign interference on X. As a result, research projects to analyze the social dynamics at work on this network have become impossible to pursue due to the lack of free access to APIs.
Faced with this difficulty of access to X data and the emergence of new players, ISC-PIF has developed a new tool – OpenPortability – to enable researchers to study the alternative social networks that have developed in recent years.
2025 – the year of the reconfiguration of our information spaces
New micro-blogging technologies
X, like all the major social networks, belongs to the old generation of social media. As Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, they are based on the capture and resale of user data. These centralized systems capture their users along with their audience and their content production, which can hardly be reused outside their platforms. As audience and data cannot be transferred elsewhere, it becomes very costly to leave a centralized social network after investing in it for a few years.
To overcome these shortcomings, a new generation of social networks has emerged, guaranteeing three fundamental principles:
- Effective data portability (independent of hosting provider). Users own their data and their audience, and decide how it is used. If, for whatever reason, a user is unhappy with the service provided by their micro-blogging host, they can easily move their data and audience to another host. This is known as effective data portability, which is also a recommendation of the DSA. To make an analogy, portability in the field of social networks is the telephony equivalent of being able to change telephone operator and telephone without losing your number and address book.
- Algorithmic pluralism. On social networks, the majority of information is consulted via the news feed on the home page. This is managed by one or more recommendation algorithms, which sort the information for users and show them only a tiny percentage of the messages produced by their subscriptions. The choice of recommendation algorithm has a major impact on user information and overall information flow. On a network like X, there are only two choices: the ‘For You’ news feed, whose algorithm is known only to X, and the chronological feed of subscriptions, notoriously impractical. As the latter is not very user-friendly, the vast majority of users get their information from the ‘For You’ news feed, whose algorithm is opaque.
A social network is said to ensure algorithmic pluralism when, unlike networks such as X, the choice of recommendation algorithm is made at the user level from a wide choice of proposals, to which the user can add his or her own. In this way, the user can transparently determine the way in which he or she is informed. - Decentralization. The ecosystem generated by the social network must not be able to be bought out by any entity whatsoever. This can be guaranteed, for example, if the micro-blogging platform is built around an open protocol. Just as no one can buy http:// (web protocol) or smtp (e-mail protocol), a micro-blogging platform can ensure the independence of its infrastructure by relying on open protocols such as Activity Pub (Mastodon) or AT Protocol (BlueSky).
Emerging networks such as Mastodon and BlueSky are part of the new generation of decentralized social networks (or in principle decentralizable for BlueSky) that guarantee these three properties, as they are built on open protocols. In short, we agree on what it means to post a resource online and relay it; then a number of players propose ways of interacting and building collectives in digital worlds. As everyone uses the same protocol, services are interoperable and everyone can exchange with and follow everyone else, even if they have chosen different services. Everyone is the owner of their own data and digital identity, just like in modern telephony with our telephone number.
The advantage of open protocols, like http, is that they encourage innovation. Anyone can contribute new functionalities or services that add to the ecosystem.
A study of the massive reconfiguration of social networking uses
This dual dynamic {changing nature of Twitter; emergence of new technologies} had already prompted a first migration from X to the Mastodon ecosystem in 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and intervened for the first time on X. At the time, X fought against this migration by banning from X the account of Mastodon and prohibiting links to certain Mastodon servers. At the time, X fought against this migration by banning the X account from Mastodon and prohibiting links to certain Mastodon servers, so that its users would not be informed of the existence of this alternative social network.
With Elon Musk’s involvement in the Trump campaign and the emergence of a second decentralized alternative to X (BlueSky), a second wave of migrations from X to the BlueSky and Mastodon networks is underway, this one much more extensive and capable of reconfiguring the global information space (BlueSky went from 10M to 30M users in two months).
This unprecedented context offers a unique opportunity for social network researchers to observe and quantify in real time a global reconfiguration of our information spaces, and to study the qualitative differences offered by these different types of social network infrastructures for and on public debate.
The main aim of the OpenPortability research project is therefore to understand what new decentralized environments bring in terms of social structures and public debate, compared with traditional centralized social environments.
To this end, OpenPortability aims to take a snapshot of the structure of the X communities that invest in the BlueSky and Mastodon social networks, so as to be able to study both the migration phenomenon itself and the way in which these accounts will, over the long term, recompose digital society in other environments.More specifically, the OpenPortability research project aims to answer a number of questions:
Do decentralized environments foster pluralistic debate? Diversity of opinion? Or, on the contrary, polarization? Will the algorithmic pluralism of BlueSky and Mastodon be enough to mitigate the algorithmic negativity bias measured on X? These are the kinds of research questions we aim to answer over the long term.
Understanding community structure on X
In order to take stock of the community structure of accounts leaving X, we need to collect followers/followees links. Until 2023, it was possible to take stock of these at a global level, thanks to the APIs provided free of charge by X.
Following their closure in 2023, users’ followers/followees data remained public on their user profile, but could not be collected at scale for research purposes. Furthermore, as X does not comply with EU DSA Art. 40 regulation (see background page), we have been unable to access this data despite our requests.
For this reason, the ISC-PIF had to develop and implement the OpenPortability data donation system in order to continue its research. This enables users of the Mastodon and BlueSky spaces to share their lists of subscribers and subscriptions with ISC-PIF in exchange for a portability service. These lists are simply lists of identifiers (without metadata) that X is legally obliged to provide to users on request (X archive), and which are the property of the users.
OpenPortability‘s portability service enables a person with an account on X and BlueSky/Mastodon to reproduce on the latter the social connections they had on X with other users who used OpenPortability. In addition to its role in research, this portability service is a service provided to any citizen with an X account who wishes to diversify their use of social networks, regardless of their use of X.
In effect, it makes available free of charge an innovation enabling data portability, a social network feature promoted by the DSA that also helps mitigate the systemic risks associated with very large digital platforms (see background page).
How does the OpenPortability research project go about collecting data?
The OpenPortability platform is open to all X users, unconditionally and regardless of nationality, within the limits of the research project’s server capacities. It’s a bridge between X and the BlueSky / Mastodon worlds. Anyone wishing to participate in the data donation program is free to do so (see data protection notice).
But it’s not enough to open a gateway for users to use it: the success of the OpenPortability research program therefore depends heavily on its visibility among X users who wish to invest in new social networks, and on the number of users who agree to donate their data to research.
This is why the OpenPortability research program has benefited from the visibility of the HelloQuitteX citizen collective and On est Prêt (We are Ready).
Openportability has also benefited from the help of volunteer developers from the Data for Good. association.
This post is also available in: French
