Twitter

X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social networking service. It is one of the world’s largest social media websites and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in posts (formerly “tweets”) and like or repost/retweet other users’ content. X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, 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 is that posts are required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017 and removed for paid 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 percent of all accounts) were not genuine people.
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. Branding changes were rolled out over the following year and completed in May 2024. In December 2023, Fidelity estimated the value of the company to be down 71.5 percent from its purchase price. Since Musk’s takeover, data from app-tracking firms has shown that global usage of X has declined by approximately 15 percent, compared to a decline of 5 to 10 percent in some other social media sites. X has disputed that usage has dropped at all, with Musk claiming that the site had grown to 600 million users as of a May 2024 post on X.

X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social networking service. It is one of the world’s largest social media websites and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in…