Twitter is a microblogging service and online community that allows users to send and read other users’ messages which in English are called tweets. The word twitter is English and means chirp, as in bird chirp.
The text length of messages on Twitter is limited to a maximum of 280 characters (until November 7, 2017 only 140 characters), but can also contain image files, links and short audio or movie clips. Registered users can send their own messages, as well as like and forward other people’s messages (called “retweet”). Subscribing to messages from someone’s twitter account is called “following” them, and those who subscribe as “followers”.
The updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and are received by other users who have chosen to subscribe to this particular user’s messages, but it is also possible to restrict the recipients. Unregistered users can only read other people’s messages. Twitter messages are usually written and read on the website twitter.com or through a mobile app.
The service is owned and operated by the American company Twitter Inc, headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Twitter was developed and launched by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Work on Twitter began as a research and development project at the company Obvious in San Francisco in March 2006, and the service was first used only within the company. It was launched to the public in October 2006.
The very first twitter message was sent on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey and contained the message “just setting up my twttr”. “Twttr” was the working name of the service before it was publicly launched four months later.
On Twitter, subject tags are used to categorize and link messages together. Topic picks simplify searches and increase the visibility of messages. Twitter recommends using one to two subject tags in each message as best practice [3] . Themeknagg was introduced by Chris Messina on August 23, 2007, but was initially rejected. The breakthrough for pegs came in October 2007 when local firefighters used #SanDiegoFire to tweet about a number of forest fires in the area.
In November 2008, it was estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million registered user accounts. The service is growing rapidly in worldwide popularity with over 500 million active users as of 2012 and generates over 340 million tweets daily in handling over 1600 million searches per day.
In August 2014, İlham Əliyev used Twitter to declare war on Armenia , as the first head of state in world history, to declare war on another country via social media.
On April 25, 2022 , it became clear that Tesla founder Elon Musk intended to buy the medium and turn it into a private company, so that he could more easily introduce changes in the business.
Donald Trump has been an avid Twitter user with his private user account @realDonaldTrump, and in May 2020 had over 80 million followers.
On May 26, 2020, Twitter chose to tag two of the president’s tweets about voting by mail with a fact check box, as a warning to readers of the posts that the content was untrue and / or misleading. [13] This prompted the president to post a new tweet that read (translated from English): “Republicans feel that social media platforms completely gag conservative voices. We will strongly regulate or shut them down before we can ever let that happen.” [14] Later that day, he said that “Twitter has now shown that everything we have said about them (and their other conspirators) is right. Great action follows!” [15]On May 28, a presidential order was issued in which Twitter was specifically mentioned for marking the president’s tweets as misleading, but not tweets about Russia’s alleged influence on the US election in 2016. The presidential order also stated that if an online company restricted access to content, the company should no longer be exempted from liability as an independent publishing platform, but be considered a traditional medium responsible for the content. [16]Trump said that “what they choose to fact-check and what they choose to ignore, or even promote, is nothing more than a political activist group.” The president claimed that Twitter is not neutral, and asked the administration to develop guidelines that prevent tax money from going to companies that prevent freedom of the press. The next day, Trump wrote about the riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Twitter marked the post as contrary to their guidelines, but kept it: “This tweet violated Twitter’s rules to glorify violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be public. interest that the tweet continues to be available. ” [17] This was described as the bravest, and most risky thing any social medium has ever done.
On January 12, 2021, @realDonaldTrump was permanently banned from Twitter when, after the storming of the Congress building on January 6, 2021, he again said that his voters would have a “giant vote far into the future” and would not accept being “unfairly treated”. [19] Twitter said the president’s recent tweets show that he does not support a peaceful transfer of power and the words can be interpreted as meaning that everyone at the inauguration of Joe Biden is a “safe” target if it becomes violent. Twitter believes Trump called for repeating what happened on January 6, 2021 and banned him permanently.