Twitter facts for kids
Logo used since 2023
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X homepage visited while logged out in May 2025
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Type of site
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Social networking service |
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| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | March 21, 2006, in San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Headquarters | Bastrop, Texas, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide, except blocking countries |
| Owner |
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| Founder(s) |
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| Chairman | Elon Musk |
| CEO | Linda Yaccarino |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | July 15, 2006 |
| Current status | Active |
| Native client(s) on | |
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Content license
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Proprietary |
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Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as "tweets" (officially "posts") and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Contents
History
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million daily tweets. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023.
The service is owned by the American company X Corp., which was established to succeed the prior owner Twitter, Inc. in March 2023 following the October 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk for US$44 billion. Musk stated that his goal with the acquisition was to promote free speech on the platform.
Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer. In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to "X" and the bird logo would be retired, a process which was completed by May 2024. Since Musk's takeover, data from app-tracking firms has shown that global usage of Twitter has declined by approximately 15%, compared to a decline of 5–10% in some other social media sites.
In March 2025, X Corp. was acquired by xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company. The deal, an all-stock transaction, valued X at $33 billion, with a full valuation of $45 billion when factoring in $12 billion in debt. Meanwhile, xAI itself was valued at $80 billion.
Logo evolution
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2006–2010
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2010–2012
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2012–2023
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2023–present
World leaders
World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter's rapid expansion and have been increasingly using Twitter diplomacy, the use of Twitter to engage with foreign publics and their own citizens. US 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.
Interesting facts about Twitter
- Jack Dorsey claims to have introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate to a small group in 2006. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter.
- Before its rebranding to X, Twitter was internationally identifiable by its signature bird logo, or the Twitter Bird.
- Twitter had mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
- 10% of users who are most active on Twitter are responsible for 80% of all tweets.
- In April 2017, Twitter introduced Twitter Lite, a progressive web app designed for regions with unreliable and slow Internet connections, with a size of less than one megabyte, designed for devices with limited storage capacity.
- In 2023 the Twitter Web site listed 34 languages supported by Twitter.com.
- Twitter relies on open-source software.
- In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans.
- In 2009, Twitter was mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter. A 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Foundation found that Twitter users are three times as likely to be younger than 50 years old, with the median age of adult U.S. users being 40.
- Twitter was recognized for having one of the most open and powerful developer APIs of any major technology company. The service's API allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.
- A practical use for Twitter's real-time functionality is as an effective de facto emergency communication system for breaking news.
- Twitter has been adopted as a communication and learning tool in educational and research settings mostly in colleges and universities.
- 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.
Statistics
User accounts with large follower base
As of 14 February 2025[update], the ten X accounts with the most followers were:
| Rank | Change | Account name | Owner | Followers (millions) |
Activity | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  |
@elonmusk | Elon Musk | 217.5 | Business magnate and chairman |  RSA Canada United States |
| 2 | |
@BarackObama | Barack Obama | 130.7 | 44th U.S. president | United States |
| 3 |  |
@Cristiano | Cristiano Ronaldo | 114.7 | Footballer |  POR |
| 4 |  |
@justinbieber | Justin Bieber | 109.8 | Musician | Canada |
| 5 | |
@rihanna | Rihanna | 108.2 | Musician and businesswoman |  Barbados |
| 6 | |
@katyperry | Katy Perry | 105.5 | Musician | United States |
| 7 | |
@narendramodi | Narendra Modi | 104.7 | Prime Minister of India |  IND |
| 8 | |
@realDonaldTrump | Donald Trump | 100.9 | 45th and 47th U.S. president | United States |
| 9 | |
@taylorswift13 | Taylor Swift | 94.5 | Musician | United States |
| 10 | |
@NASA | NASA | 84.8 | Space agency | United States |
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. The photo of twelve celebrities broke the previous retweet record within forty minutes and was retweeted over 1.8 million times in the first hour. 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. This record was broken when Yusaku Maezawa announced a giveaway on Twitter in January 2019, accumulating 4.4 million retweets. A similar tweet he made in December 2019 was retweeted 3.8 million times.
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 Germany on July 8, 2014.
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.
See also
In Spanish: Twitter para niños
