The first post was written on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorseyone of the creators of the service along with Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. The name sought to evoke the essence that inspired its creation: the brevity of SMS, text messages of 160 characters which at that time were the communication standard on a cell phone. “We wanted to capture that physical sensation of vibrating in your pocket, vibrating around the world,” Dorsey explained at the time.
Microblogging was born from the ashes of Odeo, a system for publishing audio or video messages via telephone on the web.
Glass—who would later leave the project—added Williams (formerly Google), web designer Dorsey, and engineer Blaine Cook to the team.
The platform was detected by the specialized blog TechCrunch, after someone in San Francisco will use it to report an earthquake. From there, the growth was exponential: in one year, the volume of publications tripled, going from 20,000 to more than 60,000 messages daily.
Only in 2007 did it begin to become popular, especially in the United States, with the premise of tweeting from your cell phone by sending an SMS of 140 characters (the initial limit of tweets) and a slogan, telling life in real time based on a question that the platform asked: what are you doing now?
In 2007, 400,000 tweets circulated per quarter. By 2008 it was 100 million per quarter. And on January 15, 2009, the platform changed forever, and took on the role it has now: an unstoppable torrent of information in real time.
That day, US Airways Flight 1549 had to crash into the Hudson River in New York (the failed flight was later portrayed in the film Sully, with Tom Hanks as the pilot who prevented a tragedy). All passengers were rescued alive. Janis Krums tweeted a photo of the plane sinking into the icy watertaking advantage of a technological possibility that was relatively recent at the time (cell phones with cameras and 3G connectivity).
One of the central characteristics of the platform was always brevity: messages of 140 characters, a historical limit that doubled in 2017 and which at the time was very debatable. Another key innovation—later adopted by all social networks—was the use of hashtag (with the pound sign, #) to highlight trending topics.
The idea was proposed by the user Chris Messina: The pound symbol was officially launched on August 23, 2007, and in 2014 it entered the Oxford English Dictionary.
Among the best known is #JeSuisCharlie, spread after the attack on the editorial office of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Thanks to its immediacy, Twitter consolidated itself as a kind of digital agora, a public space to narrate current events: from the protests in Iran in 2009 to the Arab Spring.
Users documented the Haiti tragedy, the capture of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and channeled protests such as the #MeToo movement. The network thus became a key tool for journalists, politicians, institutions, celebrities and even the Pope.
It was also key to changing the spread of news: Politicians, athletes, actors and celebrities quickly understood that it was (like Instagram or TikTok later) a channel to establish a direct and immediate relationship with their audience.
For years it was the main rival of Mark Zuckerberg’s ecosystem, today Meta. However, the platform never managed to fully monetize its popularity and the October 27, 2022 it was acquired by Musk for $44 billion.
The businessman starred in his arrival at the headquarters with a sink in hand and the phrase “Let that sink in” (a play on words between the concept, something like “get the idea,” and the word sink, which also refers to the bathroom sink).
A new stage then opened: Twitter became a private company, went public, reduced its staff, eliminated the security council, put account verification up for sale and in 2023 changed its name to X.
Musk’s goal is turn it into an “app for everything”, in the style of WeChatwhich integrates messaging, calls, video, payments and commerce.
But the shift has also been political and technological. Among the most controversial decisions is the readmission of Donald Trumpsuspended after the assault on the Capitol on January 6.
With his subsequent re-election, Musk briefly took over as head of a government efficiency department.
A Recent Nature study also analyzed the political impact of the X algorithm in user opinions. A study with 5,000 participants in the United States shows that the platform’s algorithm tends to push the user towards more right-wing positions, especially among people who already considered themselves Republicans.
In parallel, Musk is betting heavily on artificial intelligence: In 2023 it integrated the Grok chatbot, which in recent weeks has been under investigation in several countries, including the European Union, for functions that generated sexual deepfakes of women and minors.
“Only Grok tells the truth. Only a truthful artificial intelligence is safe. Only the truth understands the universe,” Musk says in his X profile.
With information from ANSA
