Tag: Twitter

Twitter, officially known as X since July 2023, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media websites and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as "tweets" or "retweets" (officially "post" or "repost") and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023. The majority of tweets are produced by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans.

The service is owned by the American company X Corp., which was established to succeed the prior owner Twitter, Inc. in March 2023 following the October 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk for US$44 billion. Musk stated that his goal with the acquisition was to promote free speech on the platform. Since his acquisition, the platform has been criticized for enabling the increased spread of disinformation and hate speech. Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer. In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to "X" and the bird logo would be retired, a process which was completed by May 2024. In December 2023, Fidelity estimated the value of the company to be down 71.5% from its purchase price. Since Musk's takeover, data from app-tracking firms has shown that global usage of Twitter has declined by approximately 15%, compared to a decline of 5–10% in some other social media sites. The platform has disputed that usage has dropped at all, with Musk claiming that membership had grown to 600 million users as of a May 2024 tweet. By October 2024, the platform was estimated to have lost about 80 percent of its value since Musk acquired it.