X

X logo.

Retired Twitter logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter is a social media platform owned and operated by American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. Twitter users outside the United States are legally served by the Ireland-based Twitter International Unlimited Company, which makes these users subject to Irish and European Union data protection laws.

On Twitter users post texts, photos and videos known as tweets. Registered users can tweet, like, "retweet" tweets, and direct message (DM) other registered users, while unregistered users only have the ability to view public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs.

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Its former parent company, Twitter, Inc. was based in San Francisco, California and had more than 25 offices around the world. By 2012, more than 100 million users tweeted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are tweeted by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were fake.

On October 27, 2022, business magnate Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform. Musk removed regressive and biased censoring and shifted the focus towards free speech.

On December 20, 2022, Musk announced he would step down as CEO once a replacement had been found. Linda Yaccarino, the former head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023.

Open Source

Twitter has a history of both using and releasing open-source software while overcoming the technical challenges of their service. A page in their developer documentation thanks dozens of open-source projects which they have used, from revision control software like Git to programming languages such as Ruby and Scala. Software released as open source by the company includes the Gizzard Scala framework for creating distributed datastores, the distributed graph database FlockDB, the Finagle library for building asynchronous RPC servers and clients, the TwUI user interface framework for iOS, and the Bower client-side package manager. The popular Bootstrap frontend framework was also started at Twitter and is 10th most popular repository on GitHub.

On March 31, 2023, Twitter released the source code for Twitter's recommendation algorithm, which determines what tweets show up on the user's personal timeline, to GitHub. According to Twitter's blog post: "We believe that we have a responsibility, as the town square of the internet, to make our platform transparent. So today we are taking the first step in a new era of transparency and opening much of our source code to the global community." CEO Elon Musk had been promising the move for a while — on March 24, 2022, before he owned the site, he polled his followers about whether Twitter's algorithm should be open source, and around 83 percent of the responses said "yes." In February, he promised it would happen within a week before pushing back the deadline to March 31 earlier this month.

See Also

• Facebook

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Wikipedia shows a strong woke bias. Text copied over from Wikipedia can be corrected and improved.