Rebranded American social networking service / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Twitter was an American social networking service that was rebranded in 2023 as X. Founded in 2006, it was one of the world's largest social media websites and the fifth-most visited website in the world.[1][2]
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: This article needs restructuring to accurately depict it as the predecessor of X. (June 2024) |
Type of site | Social networking service |
---|---|
Available in | Multilingual |
Founded | March 21, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-03-21), in San Francisco, California, U.S. |
Successor(s) | X |
Area served | Worldwide, except blocking countries |
Owner |
|
Founder(s) | |
Chairman | Elon Musk |
URL | twitter.com (redirects to x.com) |
Launched | July 15, 2006; 17 years ago (2006-07-15) |
Current status | Active; rebranded on July 23, 2023 |
Native client(s) on | |
Written in |
The service was created in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Its creators, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, then founded Twitter, Inc. in San Francisco, California, as a managing company for it in April 2007.
A signature characteristic of the service was that posts were required to be brief (originally limited to 140 characters, later expanded to 280 in 2017).[3] Users could share short text messages, images, and videos in posts called "tweets", and like or "retweet" other users' content.[4] Twitter also included direct messaging, bookmarks, and lists. Features added late in the service's history included groups ("communities") and the ability to annotate tweets by other users to add context, known as Community Notes.
By 2012 more than 100 million users were producing 340 million tweets per day.[5] The majority of tweets were produced by a minority of users.[6][7] In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15%) were bots rather than genuine users.[8]
In October 2022, the billionaire businessman Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, and became its chief executive officer (CEO).[9][10][11][12] He stated that his aim was to promote free speech. Since his acquisition, the platform has been criticized for enabling the increased spread of disinformation[13][14][15] and hate speech.[16][17][18][19][20][21][22] Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer.[23][24][25] In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to X and the bird logo would be retired.[26][27]