The article doesn't say "Twitter doesn't matter". It only shows that when academic Twitter users tweet, there's some correlation between [academic users] tweeting and citation, but not the causality: whether Twitter is mediating awareness of the paper or if it’s merely that good papers get cited and also talked about on Twitter.

Also, it doesn't measure any other form of engagement than citation-count (e.g. author name mentions, SEO ranking, h-factor of journals doing the citing).

As to non-scientific engagement: if a paper got MrBeast or any popular meme poster to even make one tweet about its findings, I imagine it'd get lots more layman engagement (mostly of the non-citation kind); would that translate into anything tangible on scientific engagement?

When you say "academia is broken", do you mean "there's way too much published research and most of it is inconsequential", or "citations should skew towards good, replicable research" or what?

> There's a conversation to be had about the costs (time and the risk of being cancelled) of running a Twitter account as a researcher

Has anybody quantified that? I imagine it varies hugely by field of study, and that there are some (e.g. studies of vaccines, infectious diseases, the intersection of social-media and politics, some sociology/political science, other flashpoint topics) where it's too risky. Andrew Huberman seems to be one case-in-point, although much of his posting is not hard research in his subject area. (Also, people trying to cancel someone and failing has a Streisand Effect). Also, do you factor in hte limitations on methods academics can use to monetize social-media prominence?