The Twitter interface famously prompts users to submit content by asking the question, ‘What’s happening?’. As Twitter has seen rapid change of leadership and the implications of this, emerging re-branded as X, it is a timely question to reflect back on itself, and upon the social media landscape more broadly. While the relationship between social media and higher education is far from new, the uncertainty and migration to other platforms highlight the precarity of relying on corporate infrastructure to support public scholarship. It is against this background that we launched a call for submissions to this special collection on the topic of social media in higher education. In this editorial, we will further discuss the recent changes to the social media landscape. We will focus on the JIME Twitter account as a case study attempting to make sense of the impact of this. Finally, we will introduce the papers included in the special collection, and concluding remarks.