Query: Joseph Merrick's was the subject of thousands of hate tweets.

Relevant passages:
Joseph Merrick <=SEP=> Joseph Carey Merrick ( 5 August 1862 -- 11 April 1890 ; often incorrectly called John Merrick ) was an English man with very severe deformities who was first exhibited at a freak show as the `` Elephant Man '' , and then went to live at the London Hospital after he met Frederick Treves , so becoming well known in London society . Merrick was born in Leicester , and began to develop abnormally during the first few years of his life : his skin appeared thick and lumpy , he developed enlarged lips , and a bony lump grew on his forehead , one of his arms and both of his feet became enlarged and at some point during his childhood he fell and damaged his hip , resulting in permanent lameness . When he was 9 , his mother died from bronchopneumonia , and his father soon remarried . Merrick left school at the age of 13 and had difficulty finding employment . Rejected by his father and stepmother , he left home . In late 1879 , Merrick , aged 17 , entered the Leicester Union Workhouse .   In 1884 , after four years in the workhouse , Merrick contacted a showman named Sam Torr and proposed that Torr should exhibit him . Torr agreed and arranged for a group of men to manage Merrick , whom they named the Elephant Man . After touring the East Midlands , Merrick travelled to London to be exhibited in a penny gaff shop on Whitechapel Road which was rented by showman Tom Norman . Norman 's shop , directly across the street from the London Hospital , was visited by a surgeon named Frederick Treves , who invited Merrick to be examined and photographed . Soon after Merrick 's visits to the hospital , Tom Norman 's shop was closed by the police , and Merrick 's managers sent him to tour in Europe .   In Belgium , Merrick was robbed by his road manager and abandoned in Brussels . He eventually made his way back to London ; unable to communicate , he was found by the police to have Dr. Treves 's card on him . Treves came and took Merrick back to the London Hospital . Although his condition was incurable , Merrick was allowed to stay at the hospital for the remainder of his life . Treves visited him daily , and the pair developed quite a close friendship . Merrick also got visits from the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of London society , including Alexandra , Princess of Wales .   Merrick died on 11 April 1890 , aged 27 . Although the official cause of his death was asphyxia , Treves , who performed the autopsy on the body , said that Merrick had died of a dislocated neck . He believed that Merrick , who had to sleep sitting up because of the weight of his head , had been attempting to sleep lying down to `` be like other people '' . In absence of the possibility of genetic tests , the exact cause of Merrick 's deformities has long been unclear , so that throughout much of the 20th century it was speculated that Merrick was affected by other neurological syndromes . Only in 1986 was it conjectured that he had Proteus syndrome , a very rare congenital disorder also known as Wiedemann syndrome ( named after the German pediatrician Hans-Rudolf Wiedemann ) . DNA tests on his hair and bones in 2003 in a study by Charis Eng were inconclusive . Meanwhile , in 1979 , Bernard Pomerance 's play about Merrick called The Elephant Man debuted , and David Lynch 's film , also called The Elephant Man , was released in 1980 . In late 2014 and early 2015 , Bradley Cooper starred in a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man , directed by Scott Ellis .

Twitter <=SEP=> Twitter ( -LSB- ˈtwɪtər -RSB- ) is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages , `` tweets '' , restricted to 140 characters . Registered users can post tweets , but those who are unregistered can only read them . Users access Twitter through its website interface , SMS or a mobile device app . Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco , California , United States , and has more than 25 offices around the world .   Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey , Noah Glass , Biz Stone , and Evan Williams and launched in July . The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity . In 2012 , more than 100 million users posted 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 '' . As of 2016 , Twitter had more than 319 million monthly active users . On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election , Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news , with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10 p.m. ( Eastern Time ) that day .