How U.S. academics differ from the rest of U.S. Twitter 

Big picture 

• Across the board, academics’ tweets become more climate-action friendly, less toxic, and more self-referential. 

• Socio-economic progressivism rises until about 2021 before easing. 

• Emotional tone edges upward, suggesting a slow tilt toward affect-driven communication even as overt incivility recedes.

What you’re seeing

• The eight panels trace the mean of each metric month-by-month for the balanced panel of ~100k academics. 

• Shaded ribbons show 95 % confidence bands. 

• All stances run from –1 (strongly against) to +1 (strongly in favour); toxicity is a 0-to-1 probability; egocentrism and the emotionality/-reasoning ratio are on their natural, unbounded scales.

In the climate panels:

• Climate-action stance drifts upward almost every year (≈ +0.012 units per year), stalls during the first pandemic year, then resumes its climb by mid-2021.

• Techno-optimism rises steadily across the period, with a visibly sharper slope after summer 2020—evidence of growing faith in technological fixes.

• Behavioural-adjustment advocacy is bumpier: a clear crest in late-2019, a COVID-era trough, and full recovery by 2022. Month-to-month volatility is roughly double that of techno-optimism.

In the socio-economic panels:

• Cultural liberalism and economic collectivism both increase through 2020-21, peak in early-2021, and ease back slightly in 2022. The retreat for cultural liberalism (≈ 0.005 points) is the sharper of the two.

In the tone-and-style panels:

• Egocentrism (the rate of “I/me/my” language) rises without interruption, ending 2022 about 15% above its 2016 level.

• Toxicity declines almost linearly, falling by ~0.006 (-12 %) over seven years.

• Emotionality relative to reasoning edges upward throughout, adding ~0.03 to the affect-to-cognition ratio—tweets become modestly more emotional even as overt incivility recedes.