Hi and welcome to this next episode of the Brexit and Beyond podcast.

And to kick off the new academic year, I'm delighted to say that we have not one, but two special guests in the form of, on the one hand,

Professor Matthew Goodwin, who's Professor of Politics

and International Relations at the University of Kent. I am at. Hi, am. I. And Jonathan Portez,

who's Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King's College in London. Hi, Jonathan.

Hi. Before we get into substance, as it were, I wanted to start off with social media because

you're both known for many things and you're particularly, I think, known for having both

of you very, well, large followings and strong presences on Twitter particularly.

So do you kick us off, is Twitter a help or a hindrance in what you try to do?

And feel free either of you to go first.

Okay, I'll jump in.

I think it's a bit of both.

I think at the very beginning of Twitter, a lot of academics were very skeptical of the platform and what it was about.

I can remember joining, I think, when I was still at Manchester,

more than 10 years ago, and the sort of instinctive reaction at that point was one of skepticism.

I think as we've gone on from that point, and a lot of the research has come out showing for example that

if you share papers and books on twitter they're more likely to be cited there is clearly quite a

vibrant intellectual community research community on Twitter and you can see a lot of people using it as a way of navigating research

questions and trying to hunt down sources and just have a conversation. I think at the same time,

much like the country around us, I think without question, Twitter's also become a very

feebrile, polarized, quite intense environment, where as academics,

you know, who feel, as all citizens do, I think quite strongly about the issues that have swept

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