TwitterX Wiki

**Welcome to the TwitterX Wiki!**
**Twitter**, in the process of rebranding to **X** since late July 2023, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. On Twitter, registered users can post texts, images and videos.Users can post (tweet), like, repost (or retweet), comment and quote posts, and direct message other registered users. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its application programming interfaces (APIs).

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It was launched in July of that year. Its former parent company, Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California and had more than 25 offices around the world. By 2012, more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast 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 not genuine people.

In October 2022, billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform and becoming CEO. Since the acquisition, the platform has been criticized for facilitating an increase in content containing hate speech. Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as Chairman and CTO. In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter will be rebranded to X and that the bird logo will be phased out.

### 2006–2007: Creation and initial reaction

[[null|link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twttr\_sketch-Dorsey-2006.jpg%7Cleft%7Cthumb%7CA sketch, c. 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network]]
Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was *twttr*, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to *Twitter*. The developers initially considered "10958" as the service's short code for SMS text messaging, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started in February 2006. Dorsey published the first Twitter message on March 21, 2006, at 12:50 p.m. PST (UTC−08:00): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

> ...we came across the word "twitter", and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information", and "chirps from birds". And that's exactly what the product was.
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The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007. Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview:
> With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.
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### 2007–2010

The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked *Newsweek*'s Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it."Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"

The company experienced rapid initial growth. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award. On November 29, 2009, Twitter was named the Word of the Year by the Global Language Monitor, declaring it "a new form of social interaction". In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 milliontweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
[[null|link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jack\_Dorsey\_-\_TechCrunch\_Real-Time\_Stream\_Crunchup\_-\_2009.jpg%7Cleft%7Cthumb%7CJack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, in 2009]]
Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japanscored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010,and then again at the close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The record was set again during the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Finalbetween Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jacksondied on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. The current record as of August 3, 2013, was set in Japan, with 143,199 tweets per second during a television screening of the movie *Castle in the Sky*(beating the previous record of 33,388, also set by Japan for the television screening of the same movie).

The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASAastronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA\_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.

Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application became the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

### 2010–2014

link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Logo\_of\_Twitter.svg|thumb|Logo used from 2012 to 2023
From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites, including YouTube and Flickr, and a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages' and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the "New Twitter experience" had been rolled out to all users. In 2019, Twitter was announced to be the 10th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.

On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter". However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20. On December 8, 2011, Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the "Fly" design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the *Home* tab, the *Connect* and *Discover* tabs were introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site's layout has been compared to that of Facebook.On February 21, 2012, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian search engine, finds value within the partnership due to Twitter's real-time news feeds. Twitter's director of business development explained that it is important to have Twitter content where Twitter users go. On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday by announcing that it had 140 million users, a 40% rise from September 2011, who were sending 340 million tweets per day.

On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter. On December 18, 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million monthly active users.

On January 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Crashlytics in order to build out its mobile developer products. On April 18, 2013, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone. On August 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Trendrr, followed by the acquisition of MoPub on September 9, 2013. As of September 2013, the company's data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.

During Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, when the power went out in the Mercedes-Benz SuperdomeMondelez International, Kraft Foods vice president Lisa Mann was asked to tweet, "You can still dunk in the dark", referring to Oreo cookies. She approved, and as she told *Ad Age* in 2020, "literally the world [had] changed when I woke up the next morning." This became a milestone in the development of commenting daily on culture.

### 2014–2020

In April 2014, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with a profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with parallax scrollingeffect. That layout was used as the main for the desktop front end until July 2019, undergoing changes over time such as the removal of shortcut buttons to jump to the previous or next tweet in early 2017, and rounded profile pictures since June 2017.[*original research?*]

In April 2015, the Twitter.com desktop homepage changed. Later in the year it became apparent that growth had slowed, according to Fortune, Business Insider, Marketing Land and other news websites including Quartz (in 2016).

On April 29, 2018, the first commercial tweet from space was sent by a private company Solstar utilizing solely commercial infrastructure during the New Shepard flight.

Since May 2018, tweet replies deemed by an algorithm to be detractive from the conversation are initially hidden and only loaded by actuating a "Show more replies" element at the bottom.

In 2019, Twitter released another redesign of its user interface.

### 2020–2021

link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Donald\_J\_Trump\_(realDonaldTrump)\_Twitter\_-\_%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F\_%D0%BE%D1%82\_2020-05-26.png|right|thumb|The two tweets on May 26, 2020, from President Trump that Twitter had marked "potentially misleading" (inserting the blue warning icon and "Get the facts..." language) that led to the executive order
Twitter experienced considerable growth during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The platform also was increasingly used for misinformation related to the pandemic. Twitter started marking tweets which contained misleading information, and adding links to fact-checks. In May 2020, Twitter moderators marked two tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump as "potentially misleading" and linked to a fact-check. Trump responded by signing an executive order to weaken Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which limits social media sites' liability for content moderation decisions. Twitter later banned Trump, claiming that he violated "the glorification of violence policy". The ban drew criticism from conservatives and European leaders, who saw it as an interference on freedom of speech.

On June 5, 2021, the Nigerian government issued an indefinite ban on Twitter usage in the country, citing "misinformation and fake news spread through it have had real world violent consequences", after the platform removed tweets made by the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria's ban was criticized by Amnesty International.

In 2021, Twitter began the research phase of Bluesky, an open source decentralized social media protocol where users can choose which algorithmic curation they want. The same year, Twitter also released Twitter Spaces, a social audio feature; "super follows", a way to subscribe to creators for exclusive content; and a beta of "ticketed Spaces", which makes access to certain audio rooms paid. Twitter unveiled a redesign in August 2021, with adjusted colors and a new Chirp font, which improves the left-alignment of most Western languages.

### Since 2022

In June 2022, Twitter announced a partnership with e-commerce giant Shopify, and its plans to launch a sales channel app for U.S. Shopify merchants.

On August 23, 2022, the contents of a whistleblower complaint by former information security head Peiter Zatko to the United States Congress were published. Zatko had been fired by Twitter in January 2022. The complaint alleges that Twitter failed to disclose several data breaches, had negligent security measures, violated United States securities regulations, and broke the terms of a previous settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the safeguarding of user data. The report also claims that the Indian government forced Twitter to hire one of its agents to gain direct access to user data.

#### Acquisition by Elon Musk

Further information: Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk

Billionaire Elon Musk began speaking of buying Twitter, Inc. in early 2022, stating his concerns with the company's commitment to free speech and whether Twitter's moderation policies were undermining democracy. Musk reportedly planned major changes to Twitter's treatment of spambots, a more lenient content moderation policy, revamp of its offered services, and cost cuts. In the long run, Musk expressed an intention to turn Twitter into an "everything app" like WeChat.

Initially, Musk sought a position on the Twitter, Inc. Board of Directors by buying shares of the company; the Board created a "poison pill" to prevent Musk from gaining sufficient shares. Subsequently, Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter, Inc. for $43 billion on April 14, 2022. This process went through a number of business and legal confrontations; Musk ultimately completed the acquisition on October 27, 2022, for $44 billion. Musk immediately fired the top three Twitter executives. About a week later, he began laying off about half of the company's approximately 7,500 employees.

#### Post-acquisition

A week after the takeover, Musk revamped Twitter Blue, increasing its price to $8 per month and adding new features, including the "blue checkmark" verification that had previously been reserved for high-profile confirmed users. This plan was criticized by several outlets, fearing that the potential for misinformation would increase since anyone could pay to appear to be verified through Twitter Blue. Musk opted to delay the changes to blue checkmarks until after the 2022 United States elections over these concerns and stated that accounts that were faking identities, outside of parody accounts, would be terminated. Following the takeover, various brands and companies paused advertising on the platform.

Musk undid the prior ban on Donald Trump on November 19, 2022, following a poll Musk posted in favor of lifting the ban. Musk also unbanned other notable accounts that had been banned for misinformation previously, including *The Babylon Bee* and Jordan Peterson. Musk also unbanned Kanye West; a few weeks later, he re-instituted his ban after West posted a series of tweets that Musk said were incitement to violence, including one that posted a swastika within the Star of David.

In December 2022, Musk provided internal documentation to a number of independent journalists and writers which was then publicly disseminated through a series of posts known as the "Twitter Files". The files describe internal discussion as related to Twitter's moderation steps in events such as the breaking of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, shadow banning of some conservative commentators' accounts, and the decision to block Trump. While some on the right saw the documents as evidence of Twitter's liberal bias and hostility to free speech, many people on the left described them as a reflection of how difficult it is for social media platforms to make tough decisions about content moderation.

The Twitter accounts of a number of journalists were permanently suspended on December 15, 2022. These journalists, including Mashable's Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, Ryan Mac of *The New York Times*, and CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, had covered Twitter and recently had written articles about Musk's takeover. Several of the reporters had tweeted about the controversy over Musk's banning of ElonJet and other accounts which track private jets. In response, Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin told *The Verge* that "we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk". Binder denied violating any of Twitter's policies, saying: "I did not share any location data, as per Twitter's new terms. Nor did I share any links to ElonJet or other location tracking accounts." CNN journalist Oliver Darcy wrote that the bans "called into serious question Musk's supposed commitment to free speech." A group of the suspended users created a Space — a function they were still able to use — where they discussed the actions; after Musk joined the Space and continued to criticize the ElonJet account, Spaces was abruptly disabled site-wide, with employees citing a "legacy bug". *The Washington Post* said in a statement that suspending reporter Drew Harwell "undermines Elon Musk's claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech". European Union (EU) commissioner Vera Jourova stated that the EU Digital Services Actinsists on media freedom. Jourova stated: "Elon Musk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon." On December 17, 2022, several banned journalists' accounts were reinstated.Twitter also appeared to block links to Mastodon as malware or potentially harmful.

On December 18, 2022, Twitter announced that it was banning users linking to what was referred to as "prohibited platforms" including Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram and Truth Social, as well as third party link aggregators such as Linktree. Six hours after his announcement, Musk tweeted: "Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won't happen again." It is unclear if the earlier policy will be reversed. He also tweeted a poll asking users if he should remain as head of Twitter promising to abide by its results, in which 57.5% of the 17.5m votes were in favour of him stepping down. On December 20, 2022, Musk announced he would step down as CEO once a replacement had been found, and that he would then run the software and servers teams.

Since the acquisition, Twitter's stability has been called into question, with reports that Musk had "disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks" in a data center used by Twitter, just before a large-scale outage of the platform occurred in December 2022. In 2023, many alternative third-party Twitter clients including Tweetbot, stopped working without warning and without any apparent explanation from the company. Later, Twitter announced it was "enforcing long-standing API rules" and retroactively changed its Developer Terms of Service afterward to justify its unannounced banning of third-party Twitter clients.

In February, Twitter announced that it would be removing the free tier of its API and replacing it with a "basic paid tier", effectively shutting down the many bots and applications that use the platform. Twitter also announced that they would be restricting SMS two-factor authentication to Twitter accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue.
[[null|link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linda\_Yaccarino\_by\_James\_Tamim\_(cropped).png%7Cthumb%7CLinda Yaccarino, current CEO of Twitter]]
On March 23, 2023, Twitter announced that "legacy" verification badges would be removed starting on April 1: this date passed with no change before Twitter and Musk both announced (at different dates) that the removal date for checkmarks from non-paying accounts was April 20. The only way to acquire a blue checkmark would be through the paid Twitter Blue subscription. On March 27, Elon Musk announced via a tweet that starting April 15, only Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in polls and appear in others' "for you" timeline, but the change never occurred. On April 3, 2023, Twitter's bird logo was replaced with an image of the Doge meme for website users, for reasons not explained. Some speculated that it may have been a late-posted April Fools' Day joke. The blue bird logo returned on April 7, 2023.

As of mid-April, Twitter no longer allows searching tweets without an account.

In June 2023, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter would begin treating the terms *cisgender* and *cis* as slurs on its platform.

On June 30, 2023, Twitter blocked unregistered users from viewing tweets or profiles on the platform. This not only blocked unregistered users from accessing tweets, but it also prevented search engines from indexing its pages, resulting in a loss of over half of its indexed URLs in the past few days. Musk described the change as a "temporary emergency measure" on his own profile, blaming "several hundred organizations" for scraping data from the site. The following day further measures were implemented with temporary limits to the amount of tweets a user can see per day, with verified users having 6,000, unverified users having 600 and newly created users having 300. This limit was later increased to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new accounts. Around three hours after this announcement, the limit was once again raised to 10,000 for verified users, 1,000 for unverified users, and 500 for new accounts.After July 4, Twitter removed the block for unregistered users to view tweets and profiles; however, the ability to view threads and more than one tweet in a single page still requires an account.

#### Rebrand to X

Following Twitter's change in ownership, speculations of an upcoming rebrandbegan as Musk began referring to the platform as "X/Twitter" and "X (Twitter)", and renamed several features, including Birdwatch to Community Notes and Quote Tweets to Quotes. On July 23, 2023, Musk teased that the platform would receive a rebrand, beginning with a new logo based around the letter X. He later tweeted that if he found a logo, the rebrand would be implemented the next day. Subsequently, he tweeted a video of the Twitter logo glitching into an abstract X logo.

Later that day, Musk confirmed the rebrand, which started when the x.comdomain (formerly associated with PayPal) began redirecting to Twitter; the logo was changed from the bird to the X the next day, and the platform's official main and associated accounts also began using the letter X within their handles. The @x handle was originally owned by photographer Gene X Hwang, who registered it in 2007. Hwang had expressed willingness to sell the handle, but received an email on July 25, 2023, stating that the company was taking it. He was offered some X merchandise and a meeting with the company's leaders, but no financial benefits. The Android app's name and icon were changed to X on Google Play by July 27; the same change went live on the App Store on July 31 after Apple granted an exception to its minimum character length of 2. Around that time, some more elements of the Twitter branding were removed from the web version, including tweets being renamed to "posts". The App Store tagline was changed from "Let's talk." to "Blaze your glory!" A giant glowing X was set up on the roof of the company's headquarters; however, it was taken down after four days as it had been put up without a permit and had received 24 complaints from nearby residents.

The rebrand was described as unusual, given that Twitter's brand was already strong internationally, with words like "tweet" having entered common language. The rebranding has been criticized on the basis that the trademarkability of the name and logo is weak: there are almost 900 companies in the U.S. that own an *X*trademark, including an existing social media-related logo owned by Meta Platforms. The early version of the X logo also closely resembles Unicode's blackboard bold character U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X, which has appeared in mathematical textbooks since the 1970s; one user of the platform also noted a similarity of the logo to the lowercase *x* in the Monotype font Special Alphabets 4, though Monotype has confirmed that they are not exactly alike. In September 2023, *Ad Age*, citing *The Harris Poll*, noted that the rebranding had not caught on, with the majority of users as well as notable brands still referring to X as "Twitter".

### Posts

link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twitter\_wikipedia.png|right|thumb|The Twitter account page for Wikipedia as of July 2023
Posts are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to only their followers. Users can mute users they do not wish to interact with, block accounts from viewing their posts, and remove accounts from their followers list. Users can post via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. Users may subscribe to other users' posts—this is known as "following" and subscribers are known as "followers" or "tweeps", a portmanteau of Twitter and peeps. Individual posts can be forwarded by other users to their own feed, a process known as a "repost". In 2015, Twitter launched "quote tweet" (originally called "retweet with comment"), a feature that allows users to add a comment to their post, imbedding one post in the other. Users can also "like" (formerly "favorite") individual tweets.

The counters for "likes", "reposts", and replies appear next to the respective buttons in timelines such as on profile pages and search results. Counters for likes and reposts exist on a post’s standalone page too. Since September 2020, quote tweets, formerly known as "retweet with comment", have their own counter on their post page. Until the legacy desktop front end that was discontinued in 2020, a row with miniature profile pictures of up to ten liking or retweeting users was displayed (earliest documented implementation in December 2011 overhaul), as well as a tweet reply counter next to the according button on a tweet's page.

Twitter allows users to update their profile via their mobile phones either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones and tablets. Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. In a 2009 *Time* magazine essay, technology author Steven Johnson described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple":
> As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education.
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Twitter announced in a tweet on September 1, 2022, that the ability to edit a tweet was being tested for select users. The company said the feature was being tested first to determine whether it could be abused. Editing would be allowed for 30 minutes, and previous versions of an edited post would be available. Eventually, all Twitter Blue subscribers would be able to use the feature.

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