Twitter

A pioneering social media platform, Twitter enabled unprecedented real-time communication between people around the world, as well as widespread visibility into that communication. In July 2023 CEO Elon Musk renamed the company to X and overhauled its branding.

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to respond—in 280 characters or less—to the website’s prompt: “What’s happening?” (originally “What are you doing?”). These updates are called “tweets” and displayed on a user’s Twitter profile. Users can follow updates from other users and reply to one another publicly (using an @ sign before the other user’s name) or privately through direct messages. It is also possible for users to “retweet” (reshare) another user’s commentary and “favorite” select tweets. Members can utilize privacy settings that limit who can see their tweets, but the default setting is public to facilitate discovery and exchange.

Features such as hashtags—which use the # symbol—allow users to follow a discussion on particular subjects and also help them find other like-minded people. Trending topics, added in April 2009, showcase current topics of discussion and popular hashtags. Twitter lists, also launched in 2009, enabled users to create public or private lists of users by topic.

Twitter has shown value on several fronts, primarily as a content sharing and discovery application. Unlike the social network Facebook, where users typically interact primarily with friends, Twitter is generally open. Any user can follow any other user, unless the user’s tweets are protected. This makes the service almost as concerned with the flow of information as the identity of the people exchanging it and has led to many beneficial uses such as political activism and citizen journalism. However, like other social media platforms it has also been criticized on various grounds, including for promoting misinformation and potentially restricting certain viewpoints.

Origins

In 2006 employees at a podcasting platform called Odeo in San Francisco were asked to come up with new product ideas due to languishing consumer interest in the company’s core product. An employee named Jack Dorsey suggested working on a text message–based social status update system, an idea he had formed based on his interest in dispatch routing and experience routing cabs and bike messengers.

Dorsey tackled the idea with Odeo cofounder Noah Glass, a contract developer named Florian Weber, and Christopher “Biz” Stone. Glass is often credited with coming up with the name Twitter (initially styled Twttr). The initial concept was presented to the Odeo team in February 2006. Work on the project continued and Twitter was founded in March 2006 before being launched publicly in July.

In October 2006 Obvious Corporation was formed as a parent company for Twitter and the soon-to-be-dissolved Odeo after Odeo CEO Evan Williams bought back all shares from the company’s investors. Williams’s decision to regain control of Odeo without telling investors about Twitter was seen as questionable; some thought he should have disclosed more information or invited Odeo investors to invest in Twitter as well. Twitter has also been seen as failing to fully acknowledge the role of some Odeo employees, particularly Noah Glass, in the company’s beginnings.

Twitter was created using the Ruby on Rails web development framework, MySQL database and a FlockDB graph database to connect users. Twitter developers have asserted that the system was built primarily as a content management system, not a messaging system. This led to frequent service outages when the system was overloaded, which was not corrected without major changes to the site’s architecture.

History

Initially, Twitter was focused on text messaging; some called the service a “group text chat.” Early users, including Odeo employees, generated high cell phone bills by sending high volumes of text messages. The site originally limited tweet length to 140 characters, a restriction that was developed in part due to text messaging limitations.

In August 2006, an earthquake in San Francisco—where Twitter and many of its early users were located—was widely discussed on Twitter. This was a preview of how important real-time conversations would be to the service’s growth.

Twitter first saw broad exposure at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference held in Austin, Texas. Many conference attendees started using the service if they had not been doing so already and spread the word to their colleagues and friends. Usage tripled from twenty thousand to sixty thousand daily tweets during SXSWi. Other major events in 2007, including the MTV Music Awards and the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference, proved popular on Twitter.

The release of the iPhone in July 2007 boosted smartphone usage and enabled users to access Twitter directly from the web, rather than through texts. This increased Twitter’s popularity further, particularly among the tech-savvy set. Several iPhone apps were also developed to help users tweet on their phones. Usage grew from four hundred thousand tweets per quarter in 2007 to one hundred million tweets per quarter in 2008. The number of tweets may indicate usage more accurately than number of users because many people sign up for the service but never actually tweet. The vast majority of tweets (some estimates say 75 percent) come from a small percentage of overall users.

In October 2008, Dorsey stepped down and Williams became CEO. Later that fall, Twitter rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook. Twitter reached 1.3 million users by March 2008 and would grow to 6 million users by April 2009. The company’s revenue sources were unclear as of 2009, but many anticipated that it would offer some sort of advertising. The company was valued at $1 billion in that year. Investors included Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

Twitter acquired several companies, including Summize (search and filter) in July 2008, Values of n (social software design) in November 2008, and Mixer Labs (geolocation) in December 2009. All of these acquisitions could be seen as steps toward consolidating features and keeping users more closely integrated with the Twitter ecosystem. Other external tools were crucial in building interest, such as 2008s TwitPic, a way to tweet pictures.

In October 2010, cofounder Williams stepped down as CEO, handing the tittle over to Dick Costolo. In 2011, which marked Twitter’s fifth-year anniversary, Twitter inventor and cofounder Dorsey came back to occupy the role of executive chair. In the following years, Twitter remained a social media force, often drawing attention for its continued growth in both size and influence. On March 2, 2014, comedian Ellen DeGeneres set a new record for most retweets with a selfie photograph taken at the Oscars awards ceremony. This famous photo included celebrities like Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o, and Bradley Cooper. Subsequent record-setting tweets also often made headlines, including a teenager's appeal to win free chicken nuggets from the fast food chain Wendy's in 2017.

In August 2015 Twitter increased the character limit for direct messages. This meant that users were able to have up to 10,000 characters to express their thoughts. In October of that same year, Dorsey was named permanent CEO after serving as interim CEO of the microblogging site since July. In November 2017 Twitter increased the character limit for tweets from 140 to 280, following a trial run affecting a small number of accounts that began in September of that year.

In June 2020 the platform deactivated its legacy website layout. In January 2021 Twitter acquired the email newsletter service Revue, in order to compete with other like platforms. Over the next year the company acquired several other apps and products in order to expand its services, including podcasting app Breaker, news aggregator app Brief, and screen-sharing app Squad. In general, though, Twitter was seen as slower to evolve and add new features compared to other social media platforms, and sometimes new features were not accepted by users. In November 2020, for example, the company introduced Fleets, a feature that allowed users to create posts that quickly disappeared, similar to Instagram or Snapchat Stories; however, the feature was not widely used, and in August 2021 was removed.

Dorsey stepped down as Twitter's CEO and was replaced by Parag Agrawal in late 2021. Another significant change in the company's leadership and direction came in April 2022, when its board agreed to a purchase offer of about $44 billion made by tech mogul Elon Musk. At the time of the purchase agreement, Musk indicated that his intentions included greatly increasing the platform's number of users, altering its algorithm for the sake of transparency, and creating additional features. According to reports, Musk also planned to transition the company from a public one to a private one. Some criticized the acquisition, expressing concern that, in part due to his past behavior on the platform, Musk might allow his personal views about issues or individuals to impact users' freedoms.

After the deal's announcement, Twitter's stock price declined, and the company lost $125 billion in market value by the end of April 2022. As the company struggled with these losses, Musk began to hint that he could back out of the deal. Among other concerns, he cited a need to determine what percentage of Twitter accounts were actually non-human accounts, often referred to as bots. By the end of May, data emerged suggesting that as many as 5 percent of Twitter accounts were bots. In July, after weeks of hinting as much, Musk informed Twitter of his formal intent to cancel his purchase and withdraw from the deal, claiming the company had violated various terms of the agreement. Twitter's share price dropped further after this news broke. In response to Musk's actions, the company sued him for breaching a legally binding agreement.

Amid the context of its legal dispute with Musk, Twitter also came under increased public scrutiny starting in August 2022 after a whistleblower, Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, the company's former security chief, revealed major flaws with the company's security, data protection, and data storage policies. On September 13, Zatko testified before a US Senate panel and described in detail what he felt were multiple issues with Twitter's practices. While the company attempted to downplay the seriousness of these allegations, Zatko's testimony helped reignite a debate over data privacy laws in the US and government oversight of large tech corporations.

In early October 2022, Musk indicated that he would go through with the Twitter purchase after all, following extended negotiations. The deal was finalized later that month, for the original $44 billion purchase price. Musk promptly fired CEO Agrawal and other top executives and delisted the company from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Taking an active role in running Twitter, Musk quickly explored various changes to the company and the platform, many of which focused on the goal of increasing revenues, as the company had long struggled to turn a profit. One early move was the launch of a subscription service, Twitter Blue, that allowed any user to pay to receive a blue check mark on their profile, which previously signified an account that had been verified as authentic. The launch of Twitter Blue was initially marred by widespread instances of fraudulent accounts gaining verification and subsequently impersonating brands, celebrities, and corporations. Musk also instituted major layoffs, with the company's workforce cut almost in half by early November. On top of these layoffs, the company also lost other employees who chose to resign rather than work at the company under Musk's leadership. Many employees as well as outside observers criticized the way these layoffs were handled and noted that they disrupted the company's operations, particularly in the area of content moderation.

Musk's takeover of Twitter met with mixed responses. Many social justice activists, noting Musk's stated intent to relax the platform's content regulations, as well as his own frequent controversial remarks, worried that hate speech and misinformation—already seen as a problem—might further proliferate on Twitter. By early December 2022, some researchers noted that a surge in hate speech had indeed occurred on the platform. Around this time, some major companies, including pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and food corporation General Mills, halted their advertising on Twitter out of concerns about potential changes. Some users began to boycott Twitter, especially amid Musk's right-wing political activism around the 2022 US midterm elections, and promote competitor platforms. Musk and his supporters, meanwhile, characterized such activity as attacks on free speech and claimed that the company would become more financially stable while providing more transparency to users.

In December 2022 Musk, announced plans to eventually step down as Twitter's CEO once a replacement could be found. However, despite this announcement, Musk's controversial leadership of Twitter continued into 2023. This period was marked by continued job cuts; by March of that year, at least 3,750 Twitter employees had been let go, with some employees claiming they had been fired after criticizing Musk. That month Musk announced that Twitter's financial situation had improved after experiencing a decline in revenue before his takeover. Meanwhile, according to a number of Twitter users, the site remained plagued by outages and other technical issues, which some experts speculated was related to job cuts in engineering departments responsible for keeping the site operational.

Amid these changes and the significant controversy surrounding Musk's takeover, Twitter continued to face declining advertising revenue; by July 2023 the company had lost nearly half of its ad revenue, according to Musk himself. Meanwhile, he oversaw a number of other changes at Twitter during that time. In one of his biggest changes to date, in July 2023 Musk renamed Twitter to X.com and changed the company's logo from a blue bird, its longtime signature, to a white "X" on a black background.

Uses and Restrictions

Despite some perception of Twitter as a tool for banal exchanges, the service proved integral in supporting political activism and citizen journalism. One of the first and highest-profile instances of Twitter as a news tool took place in November 2008, when local updates about bomb attacks at a hotel in Mumbai, India, were widely shared on the service. Twitter’s potential for organizing protests led the Iranian government to block the service during its 2009 presidential elections; to support Iranian users, Twitter kept servers up at that critical time despite planned maintenance.

The service is also widely used during events such as sporting games, television shows, or awards ceremonies; the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and 2008 presidential election were two examples of major events widely covered on Twitter. When pop star Michael Jackson died in June 2009, a record-setting 456 tweets per second were sent about his passing, reflecting the growing importance of Twitter for sharing timely information.

The 2016 US presidential election revealed Twitter and other social media platforms' vulnerability to interference by international political disinformation campaigns. In the fall of 2017, representatives from Twitter, Facebook, and Google testified before Congress regarding election interference that had taken place on their platforms. Twitter investigated thousands of accounts thought to be linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), from Russia, or Iran. The platform subsequently contacted approximately 1.4 million users who had had interactions with these accounts. Additionally, it compiled and archived data related to the interference campaigns and made it accessible so that it could be used for investigative and academic research, with the goal of preventing foreign political interference and manipulation.

In December 2017, the platform began permanently suspending the accounts of users who were affiliated with hate groups, such as the American Nazi Party and groups involved with the white nationalist rally that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Users who otherwise violated Twitter's hateful conduct policy also had their accounts suspended.

To help reassure users that the site was trustworthy, starting in 2018 Twitter executed a purge of accounts that had been marked as suspicious and long considered fake. This caused many high-profile users such as politicians and celebrities to lose thousands if not millions of followers. For example, actor Ashton Kutcher's follower count dropped by more than a million users; Oprah Winfrey's dropped by 1.4 million, and DeGeneres's dropped by two million. In August 2018 Twitter purged the accounts of users who were previously suspended from the platform for abusive behavior and had subsequently attempted to evade suspension by setting up another account. That September, Twitter and Periscope permanently suspended the accounts of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his associated outlet, InfoWars, for multiple violations of its abusive behavior policy. Jones had previously been banned by other social media platforms including Apple, Facebook, and YouTube. Jones criticized the ban, saying that he was being censored.

Twitter was again subject to high-profile controversy in 2020, as criticisms of US president Donald Trump's prominent use of the platform increased. Many credited Trump's effective use of Twitter as a key factor in his rise to power, but his opponents often took issue with the conduct of his tweets, accusing him of inflammatory rhetoric and false claims that potentially violated the service's terms of use policy. Although Twitter occasionally did remove posts by or suspend accounts of various world leaders due to policy violations, the company long resisted taking action against most high-profile accounts, including Trump's. In May 2020, however, after Trump tweeted about potential voter fraud despite a lack of evidence for such behavior, Twitter reacted by attaching fact-checking warnings to the tweets. (The company had recently announced this labeling tool, originally aimed at curbing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.) A few days later Twitter hid a Trump tweet about shooting looters following the death of George Floyd in police custody, claiming that it violated the platform's rules against glorifying violence, but allowed it to still be accessed due to public interest. Trump immediately denounced the company's actions as censorship and threatened to shut down social media outlets for stifling free speech, particularly that of conservatives. He also signed an executive order aimed at removing longstanding legal protections for websites that post user-generated content.

After the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021—which was shown to be at least partially incited by previous Tweets and Trump's speech that day—Twitter suspended Trump's account for breaking their policies that prohibited glorifying violence and spreading misinformation. Shortly after, Twitter announced that the ban was permanent, and would remain so even if Trump ran for election again in the future. The move sparked controversy around the world, with some approving Twitter's decision or claiming the action was welcome but came too late, while others questioned the social media company's ability to hold that much power of speech, galvanizing discussion about private companies and the protection of free speech versus tolerance of misinformation. In a related development, also in January 2020 Twitter launched a feature known as Birdwatch, which took a crowdsourcing approach to curbing misinformation, allowing approved users to fact-check tweets and attach contextual notes to problematic posts.

This debate continued after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in 2022, as he posed himself as a champion of free speech and suggested he would loosen the company's content restrictions. In November of that year Musk followed through on promises to restore the banned accounts of a number of high-profile, controversial users, including former president Trump, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and influencer Andrew Tate, whose account was suspended in 2017 following a number of misogynistic tweets. While some individuals praised this move, a number of critics alleged that Musk, like Trump, misunderstood the principle of free speech and was primarily concerned with self-promotion. Many observers pointed out that soon after Musk assumed ownership of Twitter the platform began to censor some parody accounts, including those lampooning Musk himself.

Other issues emerged in 2023 as Musk continued to overhaul numerous aspects of Twitter's functionality and operations. One decision which led to particularly intense criticism was Musk's announcement in August 2023 that he planned to remove or severely limit the site's blocking feature, which allows users to prevent others on the site from contacting them and also hides content generated by the blocked user. Some argued that the removal of the block feature could create a number of issues, including placing users at a greater risk of harassment

Impact

Twitter changed the way that people interact online, fostering shorter messages in real time and enabling discovery across professional and geographic boundaries. Praised by many as an important means of disseminating information, it also drew criticism for potentially amplifying misleading or harmful messages. Along with other social media services, Twitter drew new attention to issues such as freedom of speech, censorship, and corporate social responsibility in the internet age.

Bibliography

Conger, Kate, and Mike Isaac. "Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online Revolt." The New York Times, 8 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/twitter-trump-suspended.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Conger, Kate, and Sheera Frenkel. "Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find." The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html#. Accessed 23 May 2024.

D'Innocenzio, Anna. "Elon Musk Announces He is Changing Twitter’s Brand and Logo to ‘X’." PBS, 23 July 2023, www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/elon-musk-announces-he-is-changing-twitters-brand-and-logo-to-x. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Epstein, Jake, and Isabella Zavarise. "Here are the Suspended Twitter Accounts That Have Been Reinstated Since Elon Musk Took Over." The New York Times, 21 Nov. 2022, www.businessinsider.com/list-of-twitter-accounts-reinstated-since-elon-musk-took-over-2022-11. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Feiner, Lauren. "Twitter Accepts Elon Musk's Buyout Deal." CNBC, 25 Apr. 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/twitter-accepts-elon-musks-buyout-deal.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Feiner, Lauren. "Twitter Whistleblower Testifies to Senate of Major Security Flaws: ‘They Don’t Know What They Have.’" CNBC, 13 Sept. 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/09/13/twitter-whistleblower-testifies-of-serious-security-flaws-to-senate.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Herrman, John. "Twitter Is Stuck with Itself, Too." The New York Times, 4 Aug. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/style/twitter-fleets.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Isaac, Mike, and Ryan Mac. "Elon Musk, Under Financial Pressure, Pushes to Make Money From Twitter." The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/elon-musk-twitter-money-finances.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Isaac, Mike, Ryan Mac, and Kate Conger. "Elon Musk, Plus Circle of Confidants, Tightens Control Over Twitter." The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/technology/elon-musk-twitter-control.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Jacobs, Julia. "In Twitter Purge, Top Accounts Lose Millions of Followers." The New York Times, 12 July 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/technology/twitter-followers-nyt.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Kirby, Jen. "Twitter Decides It’s Sticking with This 280-Character Thing." Vox, 7 Nov. 2017, www.vox.com/technology/2017/11/7/16621286/twitter-expands-character-limit-280. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Leight, Elias. "Twitter Permanently Suspends Alex Jones, InfoWars." Rolling Stone, 6 Sept. 2018, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/twitter-bans-alex-jones-infowars-719877/. Accessed 23 May 203.

Mac, Ryan. "Elon Musk Says Twitter’s Finances Are Improving After Big Cuts." The New York Times, 7 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/elon-musk-twitter-finances.html?searchResultPosition=2. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Napolitano, Elizabeth. "Musk Reveals Twitter Ad Revenue is down 50% as Social Media Competition Mounts." CBS News, 17 July 2023, www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-traffic-falls-under-elon-musk-threads-mastodon-bluesky-competition/. Accessed 23 May 2024.

O’Reilly, Tim, and Sarah Milstein. The Twitter Book. O’Reilly, 2011.

Romano, Aja. "At Long Last, Twitter Has Begun Banning (Some, Not All) Nazis." Vox, 18 Dec. 2017, www.vox.com/2017/12/18/16790864/twitter-bans-nazis-hate-groups. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Silverstein, Jason. "Twitter Flags Trump Tweet with Fact-Checking Label for First Time." CBS News, 27 May 2020, www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-adds-fact-check-warning-trump-tweets/. Accessed 23 May 2024.

"Trump Signs Executive Order Targeting Twitter after Fact-Checking Row." BBC News, 29 May 2020, www.bbc.com/news/technology-52843986. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Twitter Public Policy. "Update on Twitter's Review of the 2016 US Election." Twitter, 19 Jan. 2018, blog.twitter.com/official/en‗us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Walker, Bernadette. "Behind the Failed Plan for Elon Musk to Save Twitter." Bloomberg, 8 Feb. 2024, www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-08/behind-the-failed-plan-for-elon-musk-to-save-twitter-big-take. Accessed 23 May 2024.