That same month, it launched Moments, a curated feed of tweets organized by topic. In the the UK, the Online Safety Act will soon be enforced, under which companies will have to make commitments to the regulator Ofcom about how they will tackle illegal content and posts that are harmful to children. In Australia, politicians have gone a step further and approved plans to ban children under 16 from using social media. The account has been accused of inflaming hate with posts about issues including immigration and religion.
- He has been accused of enabling cyberbullying by changing how these functions work.
- In November 2020, Twitter introduced Fleets—temporary posts that disappeared after 24 hours—modeled after Stories on Snapchat (SNAP) and Meta Platforms’ (META) Instagram and Facebook.
- The successor to Twitter, X Corp., is a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings Corp., which is controlled by South African–born American entrepreneur Elon Musk.
- But the profile responded by saying that they were “actually inciting safety”.
- At the time of Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, ad revenue generated 90% of Twitter’s revenue, according to company filings.
Bring back Twitter
Political campaigns discovered the value of Twitter as a communication tool. Today, X is primarily run as a social media service, although Musk has said he wants to turn it into an “everything app” that can be used for shopping, financial transactions, and more, similar to China’s WeChat. They say they know of another account making “$25,000” each month – that account allegedly has 500,000 followers and posts “roughly 30” times a day. Changes – including mass layoffs and alterations to moderation policies on issues like political misinformation – started immediately. In 2022, Twitter announced Elon Musk would acquire it and that Musk was to become the company’s sole owner.
- Inevitable West denies accusations of pushing disinformation and inciting abuse or violence.
- Unlike other sites that generated income through advertising or membership fees, Twitter had no obvious business model.
- To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
Whether the site is seen as an unvetted “town square” or a reliable source of information remains up for debate. It’s still unclear whether Musk’s vision of an “everything app” will materialize, whether such a service would face regulatory hurdles, or whether X can remain viable in its current form. After the acquisition, Musk disbanded Twitter’s content moderation team and reinstated many banned accounts, including the one belonging to President Donald Trump, which had been suspended after the U.S.
Controversy during the Musk era
Others disagree with the X owner’s political beliefs and recent step into American politics as President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-lead and unofficial BFF. On January 15, 2009, a tweet by commuter ferry passenger Janis Krums broke the story of the successful water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River in New York City. A hastily snapped camera phone image of passengers disembarking the half-submerged aircraft established Twitter as a breaking news source. The following month, Twitter, Inc. was created as a corporate entity after an infusion of venture capital, and Dorsey became Twitter’s first chief executive officer (CEO). In 2008, Williams ousted Dorsey as CEO, and two years later Williams was replaced as CEO by Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo.
2013: From novelty to news source
Advertising revenue fell sharply after many companies withdrew their ads, and the Twitter identity was stripped from the service. She argues that X’s algorithms now “privilege divisive and misleading rhetoric” and suggests that users who post less controversial content have found a reduction in the views. Premium profiles are entitled to more privileges and prominence – and can make money from the engagement they get from other checkmarked profiles. From October, X changed its rules so that instead of basing revenue for individual accounts around ads, it now takes into account likes, shares and comments from other Premium accounts. Although Twitter continued to grow in popularity, it still wasn’t profitable, so the company introduced new features to increase user engagement.
Rise of the Twitter ‘media’
Billionaire Elon Musk has hailed Twitter as a bastion for freedom of expression ever since he acquired the social media site two years ago. But over the course of 2024, X, as it is now called, has evolved from what felt like a communal town square into a polarised hub where views and posts seem even more controversial. In March 2016, Twitter replaced its purely chronological timeline with an algorithmic feed that prioritized tweets based on popularity and user behavior. The company finally became profitable in the last quarter of 2017, when it reported 330 million monthly users. Even so, it posted positive earnings in only two of its eight years as a public company. Twitter started as a free SMS-based service with some social networking features and lacked a clear source of revenue.
BBC News Services
The CEO has previously alluded to his goal to transform X into an “everything app” comparable to China’s WeChat platform. The rebranding took effect in July 2023, shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022. The letter ⟨X⟩, representing /ks/, was inherited from the Etruscan alphabet. It perhaps originated in the ⟨Χ⟩ of the Euboean alphabet or another Western Greek alphabet, which also represented /ks/. Its relationship with the ⟨Χ⟩ of the Eastern Greek alphabets, which represented /kʰ/, is uncertain. With Twitter no longer in existence, the ticker symbol (TWTR) was delisted on major stock exchanges.
X says that its priority is to protect and defend the user’s voice and it has guidelines about hate, which say that users “may not target others with abuse or harassment or encourage other people to do so”. It is difficult to determine exactly how many real users have chosen to leave X – or indeed if it has grown. When questioned on this, Inevitable West told me that they’d say the same about other religions. Separately, they also said they would never delete their own posts – even when they turn out to be untrue. Andi and other X accounts I’ve corresponded with believe that the changes to X are a good thing, as they now have a reach they could have never anticipated. Certainly, I’ve observed a difference in the variety of posts recommended on the “For You” feed compared with that a year ago.
The IPO took place in November and raised $1.8 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $31 billion. In April 2022, Musk signaled plans to merge Twitter with one of his corporate entities, X Holdings, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After Musk completed the deal to acquire Twitter in October 2022, he took steps to merge Twitter with X and rename the company. The US government claims TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has links to the Chinese state. The Supreme Court is due to hear legal arguments from TikTok in January. Since the 2024 US presidential election, X has cemented its place as the home of political updates about the new Trump administration.
In French (with a few exceptions), Italian, Romanian, and modern Spanish, ⟨x⟩ was replaced by other letters. In 2023, X and Musk became embroiled in controversy about how many of his changes have made the service a less reliable information resource. European regulators issued a warning to Musk and insisted that he respond with how he is battling illegal misinformation on the website. In July 2022, Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company, and in September 2022 Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. At avatrade review the time of Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, ad revenue generated 90% of Twitter’s revenue, according to company filings. In September 2013, Twitter filed for an initial public offering and announced the move in a tweet.
To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct. These factors have led to what many have referred to as a mass “X-odus”, causing huge download spikes for competitors like Bluesky, Mastodon and (very briefly) Instagram Threads. Since then, we’ve continued to bring sci-fi ideas into reality to help solve some of the world’s hardest problems. The developer, X Corp., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below.