Twitter

Twitter (Chinese translated as Twitter) is a microblog and social networking service platform originating in the United States. It allows users to post messages of up to 280 characters (140 in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), also known as Tweets. Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter ranks 35th in the U.S. in terms of visits and handles approximately 1.6 billion web search requests every day. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and some of its offices and servers are located in New York.

Twitter has been described as “the internet’s messaging service”. Non-registered users of the site can read public tweets, while registered users can post messages via Twitter, SMS, or a variety of applications. At the same time, Twitter has also played a major role in the Arab Spring and global pro-democracy campaigns since the late 2010s, as it has long been known for its liberal speech environment and immediacy trends, but it also has controversial positions that manipulate public opinion and political censorship. After nearly a decade of development, Twitter has become an important source of news, entertainment and commentary around the world, but it has also begun to face many business difficulties, including stagnant user growth and weak ad sales.

In September 2013, Twitter went public offering: on November 7 of the same year, Twitter’s stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange at $4.51 billion, up 73.46% from the offering price.

In 2021, Twitter had 192 million daily active users. Globally, 63% of users are between the ages of 35 and 65. The ratio of women to men on Twitter is about 1 to 2: 34% for women and 66% for men.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought a 9.1% stake in Twitter for $2.64 billion, becoming Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, and plans to offer to buy all of Twitter’s shares for $54.2 per share ($43 billion in total). On April 15, Twitter’s board of directors voted to approve the use of the poison pill plan, allowing shareholders to buy additional shares in the event of a hostile takeover. On April 25, Twitter announced that its board of directors had accepted Musk’s $44 billion acquisition proposal, and the deal is expected to close within the same year. However, on May 13, Musk announced that he had decided to suspend the acquisition because he needed to wait for Twitter to provide relevant data to confirm that his spam accounts and fake accounts accounted for less than 5%, and announced the termination of the acquisition on July 8. On October 27, Musk finally completed the acquisition.

On March 9, 2023, Elon Musk merged Twitter Inc. into X Company, and Twitter Inc. ceased to exist. In July of the same year, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded and renamed “X”; On July 24th, Twitter began to gradually change its name to “X”, the logo was changed from the little blue bird logo to the black X logo (X), and its URL twitter.com (page archived at the Internet Archive) was redirected to x.com (page archived at the Internet Archive).