Twitter, Inc.

In May 2011, a claimant known as "CTB" in the case of CTB v Twitter Inc. took action against Twitter at the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, requesting that the company release details of account holders. This followed gossip posted on Twitter about professional footballer Ryan Giggs's private life. This led to the 2011 British privacy injunctions controversy and the "super-injunction". Tony Wang, the head of Twitter in Europe, said that people who do "bad things" on the site would need to defend themselves under the laws of their own jurisdiction in the event of controversy and that the site would hand over information about users to the authorities when it was legally required to do so. He also suggested that Twitter would accede to a UK court order to divulge names of users responsible for "illegal activity" on the site.

Twitter acquired Dasient, a startup that offers malware protection for businesses, in January 2012. Twitter announced plans to use Dasient to help remove hateful advertisers on the website. Twitter also offered a feature which would allow tweets to be removed selectively by country, before deleted tweets used to be removed in all countries. The first use of the policy was to block the account of German neo-Nazi group Besseres Hannover on October 18, 2012. The policy was used again the following day to remove anti-Semitic French tweets with the hashtag #unbonjuif ("a good Jew"). In February 2012, a third-party public-key encryption app (written in Python and partially funded by a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation) for private messaging in Twitter,  CrypTweet, was released. A month later Twitter announced it would implement the "Do Not Track" privacy option, a cookie-blocking feature found in Mozilla's Firefox browser. The "Do Not Track" feature works only on sites that have agreed to the service.

In August 2012, it was reported that there was a market in fake Twitter followers used to increase politicians' and celebrities' apparent popularity. The black market for the fake followers, known as "bots", has been linked to "nearly every politically linked account from the White House to Congress to the 2016 campaign trail". In June 2014, Politico analyzed Twitter handles with the highest rates of fake followers: U.S. President Barack Obama with 46.8 percent, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz with 35.1 percent, and Senator John McCain with 23.6 percent. The culprits working to generate the fake followers, or "bots", included campaign workers or friends of political candidates. One site offered 1,000 fake followers for $20. The people creating the "bots" were often from Eastern Europe and Asia. In 2013, two Italian researchers calculated 10 percent of total accounts on Twitter were "bots" although other estimates have placed the figure even higher.

After a number of high-profile hacks of official accounts, including those of the The Associated Press and The Guardian, in April 2013, Twitter announced a two-factor login verification as an added measure against hacking. In August 2013, Twitter announced plans to introduce a "report abuse" button for all versions of the site following uproar, including a petition with 100,000 signatures, over Tweets that included rape and death threats to historian Mary Beard, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and the member of parliament Stella Creasy. Followed the sharing of images showing the killing of American journalist James Foley in 2014, Twitter said that in certain cases it would delete pictures of people who had died after requests from family members and "authorized individuals".

Twitter announced new reporting and blocking policies in December 2014, including a blocking mechanism devised by Randi Harper, a target of GamerGate. In February 2015, CEO Dick Costolo said he was 'frankly ashamed' at how poorly Twitter handled trolling and abuse, and admitted Twitter had lost users as a result.

In 2015, following updated terms of service and privacy policy, Twitter users outside the United States were legally served by the Ireland-based Twitter International Company instead of Twitter, Inc. The change made these users subject to Irish and European Union data protection laws

In 2016, Twitter announced the creation of the Twitter Trust & Safety Council to help "ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter." The Twitter Trust & Safety Council's inaugural members included 50 organizations and individuals.

On May 5, 2018, Twitter sent out an update/mail to every customer regarding a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. According to them the investigation showed no indications of breach or misuse but recommended everyone to change their password anyway.

On May 13, 2019, Twitter disclosed that they had discovered a bug that accidentally shared location data from iOS devices to an advertiser. They assured that the data was not retained and that the bug was fixed.

On December 20, 2019, Twitter fixed a security vulnerability in its Android app that could allow a hacker to take over a user's account and send tweets or direct messages as well as see private account info.

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has faced criticism for the behavior of some of his supporters online but has deflected such criticism, suggesting that "Russians" were impersonating people claiming to be "Bernie Bro" supporters. Twitter rejected Sanders' suggestion that Russia could be responsible for the bad reputation of his supporters. A Twitter spokesperson told CNBC: "Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them. As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence of state-backed information operations, we'll disclose them following our thorough investigation to our public archive - the largest of its kind in the industry."

On April 8, 2020, Twitter announced that users outside of the European Economic Area or United Kingdom (thus subject to GDPR) will no longer be allowed to opt out of sharing "mobile app advertising measurements" to Twitter third-party partners.

On October 9, 2020, Twitter took additional steps to counter misleading campaigns ahead of the 2020 U.S. Election. Twitter's new temporary update encouraged users to "add their own commentary" before retweeting a tweet, by making 'quoting tweet' a mandatory feature instead of optional. The social network giant aimed at generating context and encouraging the circulation of more thoughtful content.

Suspect and Contested Accounts

In January 2016, Twitter was sued by the widow of a U.S. man killed in the 2015 Amman shooting attack, claiming that allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to continually use the platform, including direct messages in particular, constituted the provision of material support to a terrorist organization, which is illegal under U.S. federal law. Twitter disputed the claim, stating that "violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear." The lawsuit was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, upholding the Section 230 safe harbor, which dictates that the operators of an interactive computer service are not liable for the content published by its users. The lawsuit was revised in August 2016, providing comparisons to other telecommunications devices.

Twitter suspended multiple parody accounts that satirized Russian politics in May 2016, sparking protests and raising questions about where the company stands on freedom of speech. Following public outcry, Twitter restored the accounts the next day without explaining why the accounts had been suspended. The same day, Twitter, along with Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours. In August 2016, Twitter stated that it had banned 235,000 accounts over the past six months, bringing the overall number of suspended accounts to 360,000 accounts in the past year, for violating policies banning use of the platform to promote extremism.

On May 10, 2019, Twitter announced that they suspended 166,513 accounts for promoting terrorism in the July-December 2018 period, stating there was a steady decrease in terrorist groups trying to use the platform owing to its "zero-tolerance policy enforcement". According to Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Lead at Twitter, there was a reduction of 19% terror related tweets from the previous reporting period (January-June 2018).

Similarly, Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and limited 150,000 more that had ties to QAnon on July 21, 2020. The bans and limits came after QAnon-related accounts began harassing other users through practices of swarming or brigading, coordinated attacks on these individuals through multiple accounts in the weeks prior. Those accounts limited by Twitter will not appear in searches nor be promoted in other Twitter functions. Twitter said they will continue to ban or limit accounts as necessary, with their support account stating "We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension".

As of July 30, 2020, Twitter will block URLs in tweets that point to external websites that contain malicious content (such as malware and phishing content) as well or hate speech, speech encouraging violence, terrorism, child sexual exploitation, breaches of privacy, and other similar content that is already banned as part of the content of tweets on the site. Users that frequently point to such sites may have their accounts suspended. Twitter said this was to bring their policy in line to prevent users from bypassing their tweet content restrictions by simply linking to the banned content.

Following the onset of protests by Donald Trump's supporters across the United States in January 2021, Twitter suspended more than 70,000 accounts, stating that they shared "harmful QAnon-associated content" at a large scale, and were "dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service". The rioters that broke into U.S. Capitol Hill included a large amount of QAnon followers.

Malicious and Fake Accounts

Between January and late July 2017, Twitter had identified and shut down over 7,000 fake accounts created by Iranian influence operations.

In May 2018, in response to scrutiny over the misuse of Twitter by those seeking to maliciously influence elections, Twitter announced that it would partner with the nonprofit organization Ballotpedia to add special labels verifying the authenticity of political candidates running for election in the U.S.

In December 2019, Twitter removed 5,929 accounts for violating their manipulation policies. The company investigated and attributed these accounts to a single state-run information operation, which originated in Saudi Arabia. The accounts were reported to be a part of a larger group of 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior. However, Twitter did not disclose all of them as some could possibly be legitimate accounts taken over through hacking.

In March 2021, Twitter suspended around 3,500 fake accounts that were running a campaign to influence the American audience, after the U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the assassination of The Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi was "approved" by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. These Saudi accounts were working in two languages, English and Arabic, to influence public opinion around the issue. Many accounts commented directly on the tweets of U.S.-based media houses, including The Post, CNN, CBS News and The Los Angeles Times. Twitter was unable to identify the source of the influence campaign.

Twitter Bots

A Twitter bot is a computer program that automatically posts on Twitter. They are programmed to tweet, retweet, and follow other accounts. According to a recent report, there were 20 million, fewer than 5%, of accounts on Twitter that were fraudulent in 2013. These fake accounts are often used to build large follower populations quickly for advertisers, while others respond to tweets that include a certain word or phrase. Twitter's wide-open application programming interface and cloud servers make it possible for twitterbots' existence within the social networking site.

Effects

Twitterbots are capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products, and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. The New York Times states, "They have sleep-wake cycles so their fakery is more convincing, making them less prone to repetitive patterns that flag them as mere programs." The tweets generated vary anywhere from a simple automated response to content creation and information sharing, all of which depends on the intention of the person purchasing or creating the bot. The social implications these Twitterbots potentially have on human perception are sizeable according to a study published by the ScienceDirect Journal. Looking at the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, the journal notes, "people exhibit remarkable social reactions to computers and other media, treating them as if they were real people or real places." The study concluded that Twitterbots were viewed as credible and competent in communication and interaction making them suitable for transmitting information in the social media sphere. While technological advances have enabled the ability of successful Human-Computer Interaction, the implications are questioned due to the appearance of both benign and malicious bots in the Twitter realm. Benign Twitterbots may generate creative content and relevant product updates whereas malicious bots can make unpopular people seem popular, push irrelevant products on users and spread misinformation, spam or slander.

In addition to content-generating bots, users can purchase followers, favorites, retweets, and comments on various websites that cater to expanding a user's image through the accumulation of followers. With more followers, users' profiles gain more attention, thus increasing their popularity. Generating Web traffic is a valuable commodity for both individuals and businesses because it indicates notability. With Twitterbots, users are able to create the illusion of "buzz" on their site by obtaining followers from services such as https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/this-is-profound-scientists-create-self-replicating-robots-from-frog-cells-1.5686653Swenzy and underground suppliers who operate bot farms or click farms. The companies that facilitate this service create fake Twitter accounts that follow a number of people, some of these Twitter accounts may even post fake tweets to make it seem like they are real. This practice of obtaining mass amounts of twitterbots as followers is not permitted on Twitter. The emphasis on followers and likes as a measure of social capital has urged people to extend their circle to weak and latent ties to promote the idea of popularity for celebrities, politicians, musicians, public figures, and companies alike. According to The New York Times, bots amass significant influence and have been noted to sway elections, influence the stock market, public appeal, and attack governments.

Developers

Twitter is recognized for having one of the most open and powerful developer APIs of any major technology company. Developer interest in Twitter began immediately following its launch, prompting the company to release the first version of its public API in September 2006. The API quickly became iconic as a reference implementation for public REST APIs and is widely cited in programming tutorials.

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Society

Usage

Protesters

Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes in many industries and scenarios. For example, it has been used to organize protests, sometimes referred to as "Twitter Revolutions", which include the protests over the 2009 Moldovan election, the 2009 student protests in Austria, the 2009 Gaza-Israel conflict, the 2009 Iranian green revolution, the 2010 Toronto G20 protests, the 2010 Bolivarian Revolution, the 2010 Stuttgart21 protests in Germany, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, 2011 England riots, the 2011 United States Occupy movement, the 2011 anti-austerity movement in Spain, the 2011 Aganaktismenoi movements in Greece, the 2011 demonstration in Rome, the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests, the 2012 Gaza-Israel conflict, the 2013 protests in Brazil, and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey. A result of the Iranian election protests saw the government of Iran block Twitter in censorship.

The service is also used as a form of civil disobedience: In 2010, users expressed outrage over the Twitter Joke Trial by copying a controversial joke about bombing an airport and attaching the hashtag #IAmSpartacus, a reference to the film Spartacus (1960) and a sign of solidarity and support to a man controversially prosecuted after posting a tweet joking about bombing an airport if they canceled his flight. #IAmSpartacus became the number one trending topic on Twitter worldwide. Another case of civil disobedience happened in the 2011 British privacy injunction debate, where several celebrities who had taken out anonymized injunctions were identified by thousands of users in protest to traditional journalism being censored.

During the Arab Spring in early 2011, the number of hashtags mentioning the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt increased. A study by the Dubai School of Government found that only 0.26% of the Egyptian population, 0.1% of the Tunisian population and 0.04% of the Syrian population are active on Twitter.

Governments

According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published in July 2014, the United Kingdom's GCHQ has a tool named BIRDSONG for "automated posting of Twitter updates", and a tool named BIRDSTRIKE for "Twitter monitoring and profile collection".

During the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, Twitter suspended a core group of 1,000 "fake" accounts and an associated network of 200,000 accounts for operating a disinformation campaign that was linked to the Chinese government. In their announcement, Twitter released two data sets detailing the core group's account activity. Geng Shuang, the spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not comment on the suspensions but suggested that the activity could be attributed to overseas Chinese citizens.

On June 12, 2020, Twitter suspended over 7,000 accounts from Turkey because those accounts were fake profiles, designed to support the Turkish president and were managed by a central authority. Turkey's communication director said that the decision was illogical, biased and politically motivated.

In May 2021, Twitter labeled one of the tweets by Sambit Patra, a spokesman of the local ruling party BJP in India, as "manipulated media", leading to Twitter's offices in Delhi and Gurgaon being raided by the local police. Twitter issued a statement, calling the police visit "a form of intimidation". Later, the Indian government released a statement in July 2021 claiming Twitter has lost its liability protection concerning user-generated content. This was brought on by Twitter's failure to comply with the new IT rules introduced in 2021 with a filing stating that the company failed to appoint executives to govern user content on the platform. Twitter stated to India's government in August 2021 that they have appointed permanent executives and staff to provide for compliance to these new IT rules.

Impact

Instant, Short, and Frequent Communication

In May 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote that social networking services such as Twitter "elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel too connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner." The following year, John C. Dvorak described Twitter as "the new CB radio".

Emergency Use

A practical use for Twitter's real-time functionality is as an effective de facto emergency communication system for breaking news. It was neither intended nor designed for high-performance communication, but the idea that it could be used for emergency communication was not lost on the creators, who knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on when the company used it to communicate during earthquakes.

Another practical use that is being studied is Twitter's ability to track epidemics and how they spread.

Additionally Twitter serves as a real-time sensor for natural disasters such as bush fires and earthquakes.

Education

Twitter has been adopted as a communication and learning tool in educational and research settings mostly in colleges and universities. It has been used as a backchannel to promote student interactions, especially in large-lecture courses. Research has found that using Twitter in college courses helps students communicate with each other and faculty, promotes informal learning, allows shy students a forum for increased participation, increases student engagement, and improves overall course grades.

Twitter has been an increasingly growing in the field of education, as an effective tool that can be used to encourage learning and idea, or knowledge sharing, in and outside the classroom. By using or creating hashtags, students and educators are able to communicate under specific categories of their choice, to enhance and promote education. A broad example of a hashtag used in education is "edchat", to communicate with other teachers, and people using that hashtag. Once teachers find someone they want to talk to, they can either direct message the person, or narrow down the hashtag to make the topic of the conversation more specific using hashtags for scichat (science), engchat (English), sschat (social studies).

In a 2011 study, researchers found that young peoples use of Twitter helped to improve relationships with teachers, encourage interactive learning, and ultimately lead to high grades. In the same study it was found that out of a group of 158 educators, 92% agreed that the reason they use Twitter is because of how user friendly it is, another 86% agreed that they started and continue using Twitter because of how easy it is to learn, and finally, 93% said they use Twitter because it is free. People found that sifting through large amounts of data is challenging, however, with the simple nature of Twitter large amount of information became easily accessible. Much of this simplicity comes from the use of the hashtag, and the intuitive nature of how Twitter as a microblogging site operates. These features help to promote education outside the classroom in a global setting where students and educators are easily able to create, connect, and share knowledge. This ultimately promotes growth and learning among students and educators, not just in the classroom, but virtually and around the world.

Public Figures

Tech writer Bruce Sterling commented in 2007 that using Twitter for "literate communication" is "about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad". In September 2008, the journalist Clive Thompson mused in a New York Times Magazine editorial that the service had expanded narcissism into "a new, supermetabolic extreme - the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world". One of the earliest documented forms of celebrity-related Twitter-like disclosures dates from 1980, when real estate mogul William Desmond Ryan made round-the-clock press releases about his relationship with comedian Phyllis Diller, even revealing what she was making him for dinner on a nightly basis. Conversely, Vancouver Sun columnist Steve Dotto opined that part of Twitter's appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints, and Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, said that "the qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful." In that same vein, and with Sigmund Freud in mind, political communications expert Matthew Auer observed that well-crafted tweets by public figures often deliberately mix trivial and serious information so as to appeal to all three parts of the reader's personality: the id, ego, and superego.

The poets Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin published a book titled Selected Tweets featuring selections of their tweets over some eight years. The book was designed to look like a small bible.

The novelist Rick Moody wrote a short story for Electric Literature called "Some Contemporary Characters," composed entirely of tweets.

In 2009, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter had a user-retention rate of forty percent. Many people stop using the service after a month; therefore the site may potentially reach only about ten percent of all Internet users. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award. During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, the journalist Daniel Schorr stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories. On November 29, 2009, Twitter was named the Word of the Year by the Global Language Monitor, declaring it "a new form of social interaction". Time magazine acknowledged its growing level of influence in its 2010 Time 100; to determine the influence of people, it used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey to Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher. The U.S. government, seeing social media's role in the 2010 Arab Spring revolts, covertly developed a Cuban alternative to Twitter called ZunZuneo as part of a long-term strategy to "stir unrest". The service was active from 2010 to 2012.

During the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared at the London Olympic Stadium in person, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, tweeted "This is for everyone", which was instantly spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.

Many commentators have suggested that Twitter radically changed the format of reporting due to instant, short, and frequent communication. According to The Atlantic writers Benjamin M. Reilly and Robinson Meyer, Twitter has an outsized impact on the public discourse and media. "Something happens on Twitter; celebrities, politicians and journalists talk about it, and it's circulated to a wider audience by Twitter's algorithms; journalists write about the dustup." This can lead to an argument on a Twitter feed looking like a "debate roiling the country... regular people are left with a confused, agitated view of our current political discourse". In a 2018 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Matthew Ingram argued much the same about Twitter's "oversized role" and that it promotes immediacy over newsworthiness. In some cases, inauthentic and provocative tweets were taken up as common opinion in mainstream articles. Writers in several outlets unintentionally cited the opinions of Russian Internet Research Agency-affiliated accounts.

World Leaders

World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter's rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy, the use of Twitter to engage with foreign publics and their own citizens. U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul has been attributed as a pioneer of international Twitter diplomacy. He used Twitter after becoming ambassador in 2011, posting in English and Russian. On October 24, 2014, Queen Elizabeth II sent her first tweet to mark the opening of the London Science Museum's Information Age exhibition. A 2013 study by website Twiplomacy found that 153 of the 193 countries represented at the United Nations had established government Twitter accounts. The same study also found that those accounts amounted to 505 Twitter handles used by world leaders and their foreign ministers, with their tweets able to reach a combined audience of over 106 million followers.

According to an analysis of accounts, the heads of state of 125 countries and 139 other leading politicians have Twitter accounts that have between them sent more than 350,000 tweets and have almost 52 million followers. However, only 30 of these do their own tweeting, more than 80 do not subscribe to other politicians and many do not follow any accounts.

Donald Trump has used Twitter as a method of providing ideas and information during his presidential campaign in 2016, the transitional period and as U.S. President. A study performed at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology showed his tweets from these different time periods and through analysis of his tweets, the professors found that President Trump uses a mode called "forensic mode" the most often in his tweets. This is described as a quick reactive usage, as they found he often used Twitter to show his judgment of the events that occurred regarding both his allies and his enemies. After his election to the presidency he tweeted this "forensic-style" tweet, "Just had a very open and successful election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very Unfair!".

In a study done at New York University in 2015, an analysis and comparison of the Twitter accounts of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, found observations showing the goals of each candidate's Twitter during their respective primary elections. Some comparisons that were made were the use of Aristotle's theory of Rhetoric. The research found that Donald Trump used pathos, the appeal to emotion, in his rhetoric; Bernie Sanders tended to use ethos and logos for his Twitter; Hillary Clinton tended to use logos and pathos to try to convey her values, and Jeb Bush shows that he uses a mix of all three on his account. The study also looked at the media response to the tweets during the election. The study found that the tweets became more persuasive for the candidates if the media put the tweets in front of more viewers, versus less powerful if they were only visible to those already on Twitter. In that way, presidential candidates who had their tweets covered more in the news were able to get their message to more potential voters.

Religion

More than twenty Roman Catholic cardinals manage active Twitter accounts, nine of whom were cardinal electors for the 2013 Papal conclave. Pope Benedict XVI's Twitter account was set up in 2012. As of April 2016, his successor, Pope Francis, has 9.06 million followers of his Twitter account (@Pontifex).

Censorship and Moderation

Twitter is banned completely in Iran, China and North Korea, and has been intermittently blocked in numerous countries including Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela and Turkmenistan on different bases. In 2016, Twitter cooperated with the Israeli government to remove certain content originating outside Israel from tweets seen in Israel. In the 11th biannual transparency report published on September 19, 2017, Twitter said that Turkey was the first among countries where about 90 percent of removal requests came from, followed by Russia, France and Germany. Twitter stated that between July 1 and December 31, 2018, "We received legal demands relating to 27,283 accounts from 47 different countries, including Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, and Slovenia for the first time." As part of evidence to a U.S. Senate Enquiry, the company admitted that their systems "detected and hid" several hundred thousand tweets relating to the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak. During the curfew in Jammu and Kashmir after revocation of its autonomous status on August 5, 2019, the Indian government approached Twitter to block accounts accused of spreading anti-India content; by October 25, nearly one million tweets had been removed as a result.

Hashtag Suppression

After claims in the media that the hashtags #wikileaks and #occupywallstreet were being censored because they did not show up on the site's list of trending topics, Twitter responded by stating that it does not censor hashtags unless they contain obscenities.

Trust & Safety Council

The announcement of Twitter's "Trust & Safety Council" was met with objection from parts of its userbase. Critics accused the member organizations of being heavily skewed towards "the restriction of hate speech" and a Reason article expressed concern that "there's not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list".

Moderation of Tweets

Twitter removed more than 88,000 propaganda accounts linked to Saudi Arabia. Twitter removed tweets from accounts associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency that had tried to influence public opinion during and after the 2016 election. In June 2020, Twitter also removed 175,000 propaganda accounts that were spreading biased political narratives for the Communist Party of China, the United Russia Party, or Turkey's President Erdogan, identified based on centralized behavior. Twitter also removed accounts linked to the governments of Armenia, Egypt, Cuba, Serbia, Honduras, Indonesia and Iran. Twitter suspended Pakistani accounts tied to government officials for posting tweets about the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. In February 2021, Twitter removed accounts in India that criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government for its conduct during Indian farmers' protests in 2020-2021.

At the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, numerous tweets reported false medical information related to the pandemic. Twitter announced a new policy in which they would label tweets containing misinformation going forward. In April 2020, Twitter removed accounts which defended President Rodrigo Duterte's response to the spread of COVID-19 in the Philippines.

In November 2020, then Chief Technology Officer and future CEO of Twitter Parag Agrawal, when asked by MIT Technology Review about balancing the protection of free speech as a core value and the endeavour to combat misinformation, said: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation ... focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."

As part of its means to moderate misinformation, Twitter launched its crowd-sourced Birdwatch program in January 2021. Trusted users in the program will have the ability to monitor tweets and replies that may include misinformation and countermessages providing fact-checking as to have Twitter tag these messages appropriately from the Birdwatch community.

In November 2021 Twitter announced an update to the Birdwatch moderation tool, meant to limit the visibility of contributors' identities by creating aliases for their accounts.

Moderation of President Donald Trump

After Trump had used his Twitter account on May 26, 2020, to issue a statement related to possible fraud associated with mail-in voting ahead of the upcoming 2020 primary elections. Twitter moderators used the aforementioned tools to mark Trump's tweets as "potentially misleading" and added links to a dedicated page with additional articles from other news sources on mail-in voting, the first time they had marked Trump's tweets as such. Trump, who had previously alleged Twitter, and other technology companies, have an anti-conservative bias, announced his intention to enact regulations to take action against Twitter. Two days later, on May 28, 2020, Trump signed "Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship" aimed to impact the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which Twitter and other social media sites have to avoid liability for dealing with moderation of user content on their platforms.

Around this time, the murder of George Floyd, an African-American, in an incident involving four white Minneapolis Police Department officers on May 25, sparked racially-driven riots in the city that turned violent by the evening of May 28. Trump tweeted his opinion on the violent protests, stating he had spoken to state governor Tim Walz about bringing National Guard forces to help calm the situation, but concluded the tweet by saying "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Twitter, after internal consultation with its review boards and management, opted to add a "public interest notice" to the tweet, warning users it "glorified violence" and while they normally would have removed such posts in the past, they "have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance." Twitter users were still able to view Trump's tweet if they chose to click on it, but could not like or retweet it without their own comment.

Going into the late months of the 2020 United States presidential election, Twitter continued to mark several tweets from Trump, other conservative lawmakers, and various alt- and far-right users with similar misinformation labels, or taking other actions when these tweets violated their user policy. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published a story containing allegations about Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. Twitter and Facebook both implemented measures on their platforms to prevent sharing of the New York Post article, with Twitter doing so according to their Hacked Materials Policy and Facebook per a policy that "in many countries, including in the U.S., if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker." Commentators from varied political backgrounds criticized the actions taken by Facebook and Twitter, arguing that they could have amplified disinformation due to the Streisand effect.

After the election, in which Biden had been determined to be the winner, Trump and several of his allies continued to dispute the results through legal actions, while continuing to assert there was fraud and other inconsistencies on Twitter.  Twitter continued to apply their moderation as they had done before. The New York Times estimated that 34% of Trump's tweets in the days after the election were flagged by Twitter. Trump continued to threaten revoking Section 230 due to actions by Twitter and other social media companies by demanding Congress include its revoking in the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. Separately, new social media companies such as Parler were created to cater specifically to conservative and right-leaning voices that felt that Twitter and other social media companies were suppressing their voice.

Twitter also proactively took steps against the "@POTUS" Twitter account, which Trump had started to use after his account was banned, blocking messages posted there as part of Trump's ban evasion. Trump also attempted to use his campaign's Twitter account before it was similarly blocked. Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey and other executives had been hesitant to evoke a ban on Trump, but was pressured by employees and members of the safety team who had seen Trump's tweets creating chatter from right-wing accounts on Twitter and on right-wing social media sites like Parler. In addition to banning Trump, in the following weekend Twitter subsequently banned or blocked more than 70,000 accounts that were tied to QAnon that were continuing to promote election fraud and pro-Trump conspiracy theories.

Twitter's decision was criticized by free speech advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union. Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel criticized the ban saying that "lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies." The president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that "having private companies decide who can be silenced and censored goes against freedom of speech." On January 14, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended banning Trump, but also said it "sets a precedent I feel is dangerous," but added "Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together."

Trump took legal action against Twitter in October 2021 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, asserting that Twitter's ban violated his First Amendment rights as well as illegal under Florida's deplatforming law that had been passed by the state in May 2021 by blocked by a federal judge in July 2021.

Fines, Penalties and Sanctions

Violation of Campaign Finance Laws

In October 2020 Twitter was fined $100,000 by Washington State for violating that state's campaign finance disclosure rules. A judgement filed on October 13, 2020, found "the social media platform failed to maintain public inspection records of nearly $200,000 paid to it for political ads in violation of state law" according to Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

Television

Twitter is increasingly used for TV to be more interactive. This effect is sometimes referred to as the second screen, "virtual watercooler" or social television - the practice has been called "chatterboxing". Twitter has been successfully used to encourage people to watch live TV events, such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl and the MTV Video Music Awards; however this strategy has proven less effective with regularly scheduled TV shows. Such direct cross-promotions have been banned from French television due to regulations against secret advertising.

In December 2012, Twitter and Nielsen entered a multi-year agreement to produce social TV ratings, which are expected to be commercially available for the fall 2013 season as the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating. Advertising Age said Twitter had become the new TV Guide. Then in February 2013, Twitter acquired Bluefin Labs for an estimated US$50 million to $100 million. Founded in 2008 at the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin is a data miner whose analysis tells which brands (e.g., TV shows and companies) are chatted about the most in social media. MIT Technology Review said that Bluefin gives Twitter part of the US$72 billion television advertising market.

In May 2013, it launched Twitter Amplify - an advertising product for media and consumer brands. With Amplify, Twitter runs video highlights from major live broadcasts, with advertisers' names and messages playing before the clip. In October 2013, Comcast announced that it had partnered with Twitter to implement its "See It" feature within the service, allowing posts promoting programs on selected NBCUniversal channels to contain direct links to TV Everywhere streaming to the program. On launch, the concept was limited to NBCUniversal channels and Xfinity cable television subscribers.

In an attempt to compete with Twitter's leadership in TV, Facebook introduced a number of features in 2013 to drive conversation about TV including hashtags, verified profiles and embeddable posts. It also opened up new data visualization APIs for TV news and other media outlets, enabling them to search for a word and see a firehose of public posts that mention it as well as show how many people mentioned a word in both public and private posts during a set time frame, with a demographic breakdown of the age, gender, and location of these people. In January 2014, Facebook announced a partnership with UK-based social TV analytics company SecondSync which saw the social network make its social TV available outside the company for the first time. Facebook struck the partnership to help marketers understand how people are using the social network to talk about topics such as TV. However, Twitter responded by acquiring SecondSync and Parisian social TV firm Mesagraph three months later. These acquisitions, as well as a partnership with research company Kantar (which it had been working with to develop a suite of analytics tools for the British TV industry since August 2013) strengthened Twitter's dominance of the "second screen" - TV viewers using tablets and smartphones to share their TV experience on social media. With the additional analytic tools, Twitter was able to improve the firm's offering to advertisers, allowing them to, for instance, only promote a tweet onto the timelines of users who were watching a certain programme.

By February 2014, all four major U.S. TV networks had signed up to the Amplify program, bringing a variety of premium TV content onto the social platform in the form of in-tweet real-time video clips. In March 2014, ITV became the first major broadcaster in the UK to sign up to Twitter Amplify and Twitter introduced one-tap video playback across its mobile apps to further enhance the consumer experience.

In June 2014, Twitter acquired its Amplify partner in the U.S., SnappyTV. In Europe, Twitter's Amplify partner is London-based Grabyo, which has also struck numerous deals with broadcasters and rights holders to share video content across Facebook and Twitter. In July 2017, Twitter announced that it would wind down SnappyTV as a separate company, and integrate its features into the Media Studio suite on Twitter.

Statistics

User Accounts With Large Follower Base

As of 5 June 2021, the ten Twitter accounts with the most followers were as follows.

Rank	Account name	Owner	Followers (millions)	Activity	Country
1	@BarackObama	Barack Obama	129	44th U.S. president	USA
2	@justinbieber	Justin Bieber	113	Musician	CAN
3	@katyperry	Katy Perry	108	Musician	USA
4	@rihanna	Rihanna	102	Musician and businesswoman	BAR
5	@Cristiano	Cristiano Ronaldo	92	Footballer	POR
6	@taylorswift13	Taylor Swift	88	Musician	USA
7	@ladygaga	Lady Gaga	83	Musician and actress	USA
8	@ArianaGrande	Ariana Grande	83	Musician and actress	USA
9	@TheEllenShow	Ellen DeGeneres	78	Comedian and television hostess	USA
10	@YouTube	YouTube	72	Online video platform	USA

Oldest Accounts

The oldest Twitter accounts are 14 accounts that became active on March 21, 2006, all belonging to Twitter employees at the time and including @jack (Jack Dorsey), @biz (Biz Stone), and @noah (Noah Glass).

Record Tweets

A selfie orchestrated by 86th Academy Awards host Ellen DeGeneres during the March 2, 2014, broadcast was at the time the most retweeted image ever. DeGeneres said she wanted to pay homage to Meryl Streep's record 17 Oscar nominations by setting a new record with her, and invited other Oscar celebrities to join them. The resulting photo of twelve celebrities broke the previous retweet record within forty minutes, and was retweeted over 1.8 million times in the first hour. By the end of the ceremony it had been retweeted over 2 million times; less than 24 hours later, it had been retweeted over 2.8 million times. As of 18 March 2014, it has been retweeted over 3.4 million times. The group selfie effort was parodied by Lego, and Matt Groening with The Simpsons. It beat the previous record, 778,801, which was held by Barack Obama, following his victory in the 2012 presidential election. On May 9, 2017, Ellen's record was broken by Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) by collecting nearly 3.5 million retweets in a little over a month.

According to Guinness World Records, the fastest pace to a million followers was set by actor Robert Downey Jr. in 23 hours and 22 minutes in April 2014. This record was later broken by Caitlyn Jenner, who joined the site on June 1, 2015, and amassed a million followers in just 4 hours and 3 minutes.

The most tweeted moment in the history of Twitter occurred on August 2, 2013; during a Japanese television airing of the Studio Ghibli film Castle in the Sky, fans simultaneously tweeted the word balse (バルス) - the incantation for a destruction spell used during its climax, after it was uttered in the film. There was a global peak of 143,199 tweets in one second, beating the previous record of 33,388.

The most discussed event in Twitter history occurred on October 24, 2015; the hashtag ("#ALDubEBTamangPanahon") for Tamang Panahon, a live special episode of the Filipino variety show Eat Bulaga! at the Philippine Arena, centering on its popular on-air couple AlDub, attracted 41 million tweets. The most-discussed sporting event in Twitter history was the 2014 FIFA World Cup semi-final between Brazil and on July 8, 2014.

On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news, with over 40 million tweets sent that day.

Additional Reading

Elon Musk's rapid changes at Twitter are risking the safety of its most vulnerable users around the world, including human rights activists, free speech advocates, and marginalized people in autocratic countries, according to the social network's former head of trust and safety. "People need to very thoughtfully and carefully weigh the costs and benefits of using Twitter, given their personal security situation," Yoel Roth, who resigned from his position as Twitter's Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, told All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro. "And that's a terrifying prospect to have to come to terms with, especially for many people who have spent the better part of a decade building a platform and an audience and a community on Twitter."

Since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late 2022-10, the billionaire has upended the company and the platform, sowing chaos and confusion for employees, users and the advertisers it depends on. Elon Musk has rapidly transformed Twitter's previous approach to what is and isn't allowed. Elon Musk reinstated accounts that had been barred for violating Twitter's rules, including that of former President Donald Trump, who was banned after the 2021-01-06 January 6 United States Capitol attack.

Last week (2022-11), Elon Musk announced a "general amnesty" for many suspended accounts (although he also suspended Ye - the rapper formerly known as Kanye West - on Thursday (2022-12-01) after Ye posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David). This week (2022-11), Twitter quietly updated its online rulebook to say it was no longer enforcing policies against misleading claims about COVID-19.

Meanwhile Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter's staff and issued an ultimatum asking remaining employees to commit to a new "hardcore" Twitter or resign. That's dramatically shrunk the number of people working to keep Twitter users safe. The cuts include contract content moderators, the company's human rights team and investigators working to curb political manipulation and child sexual abuse material. "That's the real risk. You can't do this work with a skeleton crew," Yoel Roth said.

Twitter - which no longer has a communications staff - did not respond to a request for comment. In a blog post this week signed by "The Twitter Team," Twitter said its policies have not changed and that it "continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules." It said the trust and safety team "remains strong and well-resourced."

Yoel Roth said Twitter had been justifiably criticized for being too slow to change. But Elon Musk's rapid transformation of the small, but highly influential, social network alarms him. "In place of that perhaps overly slow culture, Elon Musk is introducing a culture of moving quickly and, unfortunately, breaking things as a result," Yoel Roth said. In the nearly eight years Yoel Roth spent at Twitter, he saw the company through a cascade of crises, from Russian interference in the 2016 election to Twitter's unprecedented decision to ban Donald Trump. After Elon Musk took control, Yoel Roth was one of the few high-level executives remaining at the company as the new owner (Elon Musk) fired top management.

Elon Musk on Twitter versus Elon Musk in private

Yoel Roth described a gap between Elon Musk's public persona as a brash and capricious autocrat - Elon Musk changed his bio to "Chief Twit" after closing the deal - and the seasoned executive whom Yoel Roth interacted with. "Those caricatures weren't true to my experience with him," Yoel Roth said. "A lot of the times in the weeks that we worked together, when a situation would come up and I would explain the rules, I would explain the factors influencing the situation, and I would suggest a course of action that was aligned with our policies, he would listen to and, oftentimes, accept that approach." For example, one of Elon Musk's first priorities was to bring back some controversial accounts, including The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian news satire site that was suspended for misgendering a Biden administration official.

Yoel Roth and Elon Musk discussed whether reinstating the account would entail a broader change to Twitter's rules against misgendering or be a singular exception. "Elon Musk was convinced ultimately that taking that kind of one-off action would undermine Twitter's rules and would create gaps in consistency of enforcement that would make Twitter a less trustworthy place," Yoel Roth said. (Elon Musk would go on to reinstate The Babylon Bee's account along with others after Yoel Roth resigned).

But as the days went on, Yoel Roth found that wasn't always the case. When Elon Musk took over, Yoel Roth wrote down "red lines" he was unwilling to cross, including breaking the law and lying publicly. An important one: he would only stay as long as decisions were made based on Twitter's policies and principles. "What matters to me, ultimately, is not the decision, but how the decision is made," he said. "I wouldn't want to be a part of undermining [Twitter's approach to governing the platform] with capricious decision-making. And unfortunately, that's what happened."

Yoel Roth resigned from Twitter on 2022-11-10 - a day after Twitter's botched rollout of an $8 a month subscription plan giving users blue checkmarks. The checks previously indicated the company had verified the identity of high-profile users, but under the new program, Twitter wasn't making any effort to confirm subscribers were who they claimed to be. That unleashed a flood of accounts impersonating politicians, celebrities and big brands, further inflaming relations with advertisers, who were already wary of the platform's direction under Elon Musk. Yoel Roth's team had prepared a lengthy document warning how the feature could be abused in exactly this way, and proposing guardrails to mitigate those risks, but was largely ignored. Just the day before he quit, Yoel Roth had appeared with Elon Musk (2022-11-09) in a public Twitter audio chat where they attempted to reassure advertisers that the platform was still a safe place for their brands.

Advertisers flee, hate speech increases

Less than a month after Elon Musk took over, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers appeared to have halted spending on the platform, according to data compiled by the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America  [Wikipedia: Media Matters for America]. Civil rights groups have documented a rise in hate speech on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. Twitter had said a trolling campaign originating on far-right message boards drove a surge in racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs right after the deal closed, but that it had stepped up enforcement and banned many of the accounts responsible.

On Friday (2022-12-02) Elon Musk tweeted a graph showing "impressions" of hate speech - meaning how many times people saw such tweets - are lower than the level before he took control. But a new report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found the daily number of tweets containing hateful terms was "substantially higher" in late November, compared to the baseline before he bought Twitter. The number of tweets with the N-word tripled in that time, for example. Elon Musk disputed CCDH's report as "utterly false" and said hate speech impressions are less than 0.1% of what's seen on Twitter. Elon Musk pledged to publish the rate of hate speech impressions weekly.

Yoel Roth said he and former Twitter colleagues are "heartbroken" to see what's happening to their efforts to keep Twitter users safe. "What happens on Twitter can move markets, can change elections, and it can impact the safety of millions of people around the world," Yoel Roth said. "More than anything else, people who have left Twitter are worried about what will happen, given Twitter's importance in the world, if there isn't a team left to do that type of work."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Thursday (2022-10-27) after a chaotic, months-long buyout process, leaving the richest man on the planet in control of one of the world's most widely used social media and communication platforms. Musk wasted no time imposing himself on the company, swiftly firing several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal. "Elon Musk has a thirst for chaos and utter disregard for anyone other than himself and should not own Twitter." "The bird is freed," Musk tweeted late Thursday (2022-10-27).

A self-described free speech absolutist who has proven in practice to be anything but, Elon Musk has yet to fully detail his vision for Twitter, but critics of the takeover fear that the billionaire's suggestions thus far - including reversing the permanent bans of former President Donald Trump and potentially other figures such as the hate-spewing conspiracy monger   Alex Jones - could further deluge Twitter with disinformation ahead of key elections in the United States and Brazil.

As The New York Times   observed, "Twitter said it would prohibit misleading claims about voting and the outcome of elections, but that was before Mr. Musk owned it." "Elon Musk's plans for Twitter will make it an even more hate-filled cesspool, leading to irreparable real-world harm," said the Stop the Deal Coalition - an alliance of groups that includes Accountable Tech, Friends of the Earth,   Public Citizen, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The Stop the Deal Coalition has urged the United States Congress to investigate Musk's acquisition of Twitter. (The purchase is reportedly already facing an investigation by federal regulators.) "Musk's plans will leave Twitter more vulnerable to security threats, rampant disinformation, and extremism just ahead of the midterm elections" [2022 United States elections], the coalition said. "Elon Musk has a thirst for chaos and utter disregard for anyone other than himself and should not own Twitter."

The Stop the Deal Coalition noted that, to fund the Twitter purchase, Elon Musk is "accepting financing from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud [Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud] and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar - two countries run by repressive regimes." Saudi Arabia  [Human rights in Saudi Arabia] and Qatar are hardly bastions of free speech: Earlier this month (2022-10), the Saudis sentenced 72-year-old U.S. citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi to 16 years in prison over tweets criticizing the regime. Saad Ibrahim Almadi's son told   The Washington Post that the Saudi Arabia kingdom has tortured his father in prison.

"Elon Musk owning one of the world's most powerful communication platforms is dangerous for us all," the Stop the Deal Coalition continued. "As Musk runs Twitter to the ground, let this serve as a warning to other platforms that they will be held accountable for ignoring public safety and dismantling the guardrails designed to protect our information ecosystem."

In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday morning (2022-10-27), MElon Muskusk said the reason he purchased Twitter "is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence." But Musk's stated openness to free expression appears not to apply to his employees, Tesla customers, or journalists covering his companies.

[ ... snip ... ]

Elon Musk, like other billionaire CEOs, is also a union-buster. Last year (2021), the National Labor Relations Board   upheld a judge's ruling that Tesla unlawfully fired an employee involved in union organizing. The National Labor Relations Board also affirmed the finding that Musk illegally threatened workers "with the loss of their stock options" if they decided to form a union.

David Nasaw, emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote in a column for The New York Times on Thursday (2022-10-27) that "Musk is the face of 21st-century tech-based, extreme capitalism, just as the robber barons, who built our railroads, and Andrew Carnegie, who supplied those railroads and the builders of modern American cities with steel, embodied the exuberant and expansive industrial capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries." "Mr. Musk has exploited the opportunities emerging in a rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus and acquired a small army of investors and a fleet of lobbyists, lawyers, and fanboys (known as Musketeers)," Nasaw continued.

"Elon Musk has sought to position himself as a tech genius who can break the rules, exploit and excise those who work for him, ridicule those who stand in his way, and do as he wishes with his wealth because it benefits humanity." "It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies," David Nasaw added. "Elon Musk is a product of his - and our - times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics."

Twitter's communications team has been effectively silent since 2022-11, when it was reportedly decimated in the layoffs that CEO Elon Musk implemented after buying the company.

That means Twitter hasn't responded to journalists' questions about any of the developments that have happened since - from the layoffs and mass resignations themselves to major changes to the user experience to a series of controversies involving Elon Musk and his announcement that Elon Musk will eventually step down.

Now the press email address is active again, at least to some extent. Going forward it will automatically reply to journalists' inquiries with a single poop emoji, Elon Musk announced - via tweet, of course - on Sunday (2023-03-19). When asked for comment on Monday morning, Twitter promptly responded to NPR's email with a scat symbol.





Elon Musk,   Twitter (2023-03-19): "press@twitter.com now auto responds with 💩"  [Source  [captured 2023-03-20 10:54:30 -0700 (PST))]

Scores of Twitter users confirmed that they had successfully tested the feature for themselves, and many were quick to criticize him and the new policy. "Huh, same as general user experience then," wrote Charles Rickett, a video editor with the U.K. tabloid Metro, in a comment that's gotten more than 1,600 likes.

Elon Musk advocates for free speech

Elon Musk - who bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022-10 - describes himself as a "free speech absolutist," and framed the takeover of Twitter in terms of protecting expression.

[ ... snip ... ]

Elon Musk's  Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil rights, human rights, and other organizations that Twitter formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm, and other problems on the platform. The Trust and Safety Council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night (2022-12-12), but Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding the Trust and Safety Council shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members. ...

Jack Dorsey is stepping down as CEO of Twitter, the social media company he co-founded in 2006. Dorsey will be replaced by Twitter's chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, a 10-year veteran of the company. Twitter stock rose on the news, which was first reported by CNBC.

"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders," Jack Dorsey said in a statement. "My trust in Parag as Twitter's CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I'm deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It's his time to lead." Jack Dorsey will remain on the company's board of directors until May of next year [2022]. Dorsey was Twitter's founding CEO but left the company once before after a falling out with a fellow co-founder. Dorsey returned to the top job in 2015.

Jack Dorsey is also CEO of Square Inc., the financial payments company he founded in 2009, and has been criticized by some investors for leading two public companies at once. The hedge fund Elliot Management Corporation, a major shareholder, sought to replace Dorsey last year. It argued that Twitter should have a CEO solely focused on running the company. The hedge fund backed off its demand, however, after striking a deal with Twitter management.

Beyond running the two companies, Jack Dorsey is known to have many passions, including the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and meditation. Dorsey told  Wired Magazine in 2020 that he eats just one meal a day and tries to spend two hours a day meditating.

While Twitter is popular among celebrities, politicians and the media, it has been slow to innovate compared with top competitors such as Facebook,   Snapchat and TikTok. The microblogging platform [Twitter] has stayed largely the same for years. Only recently has it introduced new features, such as Twitter Blue, a subscription service for frequent users, and Twitter Spaces for audio chats, as part of an ambitious effort to more than double annual revenue and attract new users.

"I believe that strategy to be bold and right," Parag Agrawal wrote in a note to Twitter employees on Monday [2021-11-29]. "But our critical challenge is how we work to execute against it and deliver results - that's how we'll make Twitter the best it can be for our customers, shareholders, and for each of you."

Jack Dorsey shared an email to staff members announcing his departure on Twitter, describing it as "a tough one" but as his own decision. "There aren't many companies that get to this level. And there aren't many founders that choose their company over their own ego," he wrote. "I know we'll prove this was the right move."


[2021-11-29] Jack Dorsey: "not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter"  [Source]

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