The first message from the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorseyit was simple, even banal: “just setting up my twittr”. Not even he would have expected that what he was being born would become a fundamental price of digital history of humanity, much more than a simple social network.
Twenty years later from that handful of words, Twitter became one global forum for public debatethe place where high-level people, but also ordinary citizens, would share thoughts, news and revolutions in real time. It is the story of a brilliant idea, of overwhelming success, but also of a slow, inexorable transformation that today forces us to ask ourselves: what’s left of it?
Twitter was, first and foremost, where the internet learned to speak in real time. It wasn’t simply a place to publish updates: it was the point where the news turned on, broke into our lives, changed the dimension and meaning of the concept “live”. For years, a statement posted on Twitter by a president, a journalist, a ministry, a movie star or a company was almost as good as a official statement.
His business model was based on advertising, but his real wealth was something unquantifiable: authority. On Twitter, a verified account was a guarantee. Identity, verification, reputation and context mattered more than volume.
The stages that made history
The first symbolic date is naturally that of March 21, 2006the day of Dorsey’s first tweet. But the history of Twitter is also made up of cultural inventions that have gone beyond the boundaries of the platform. One of the most important is thehashtagproposed in 2007 by Chris Messina as a simple system for aggregating conversations, events and themes: an intuition as elementary as it is revolutionary, destined to contaminate the entire social ecosystem.
Furthermore, Twitter had built its identity around an iron discipline: i 140 characters. It was a technical limitation inherited from the SMS era, but quickly became a stylistic feature. It forced us to be quick, sharp, memorable. In the 2017ten years after launch, the platform decided to raise the limit to 280 characters for most languages, in an effort to make writing less compressed and more accessible. It was an epochal change, welcomed with curiosity by some and with nostalgia by others: because those 140 characters, after all, were part of the Twitter myth itself.
Then there are the tweets and hashtags that have burst into contemporary history. #BlackLivesMatter And #MeToo they were not simple trends: they became narrative devices, instruments of testimony, accelerators of collective awareness. They showed how Twitter could transform itself into a space of mobilization, denunciation and symbolic organization, capable of giving voice to movements that entered the center of public discourse from the margins. Twitter has been an amplifier of the Arab Spring, the protests in Hong Kong, invaluable reporting during the Covid pandemic, and much more.
From Trump to Musk, transformation or decline?
No event better embodied the power and limitations of Twitter thanJanuary 8, 2021when the platform permanently suspended Donald Trump’s account, in the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol in Washington. It was an unprecedented decision: a private platform that silenced the sitting president of the United States. The choice divided the world. On the one hand, those who rejoiced: Twitter had finally assumed the responsibility of not amplifying messages that incited violence. On the other, there were those who shouted about censorship and the end of freedom of speech.
That decision, with all its contradictions, was nevertheless the product of a system of moderation that, in the Dorsey era, still had a direction, a logic, an attempt to balance the free flow of information with the protection of public safety. It wasn’t perfect. But it was recognisable.
The second great caesura is the October 27, 2022when Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter for 44 billion dollars. Thus began the most chaotic phase in the history of the platform. Staff cuts, rethinking of moderation, new centrality of subscriptions, continuous changes to verification rules and, above all, a radical change of vision: Twitter was no longer supposed to be Twitter, but the piece of a larger project. In the July 2023 in fact the rebranding arrived in Xwith the abandonment of the famous blue bird in favor of an abstract and ambitious brand, conceived as a precursor to a future “everything app”.
The algorithm and the background noise
The real difference between Dorsey’s Twitter and Musk’s X isn’t just reduced moderation or a changed name. It’s in the signal quality. Once upon a time, Twitter functioned like a selective megaphone: it amplified authoritative voices, those verified, those followed for a specific reason. Today, the X algorithm – in its opaque and non-transparent parts – seems to reward engagement at all costs, including that of misinformation and emotional chaos.
According to Engadget, the X algorithm relies on Grok’s predictions about what users like, the same Grok that has been the protagonist of embarrassing and dangerous episodes (see the generation of soft porn images). X has become a more confusing square, apparently easier to pilotwhere background noise often drowns out the voices that matter.
This is also why numerous individuals have decided to leave or de-emphasize the platform. The withdrawal of many British universities from X over misinformation concerns; The Guardian announced in November 2024 that he would no longer post to his official X editorial accounts; NPR he had already stopped posting in 2023.
These are not isolated cases. The progressive distancing of newspapers, institutions, academic bodies and public figures indicates that X, for part of its old information establishment, it is no longer the natural place of verified public speech. And when the very people who guaranteed recognisability and reliability leave, the platform loses one of its most precious assets.
Grok and the last mutation
To make the distance from the original intuition even more evident, there is another element: Grokthe artificial intelligence developed by xAI and integrated into the X ecosystem. Today filter it, synthesize it, reorganize it and perhaps orient it through proprietary AI tools.
It is a profound mutation. The initial idea of Twitter was simple and genuine: to offer an essential, immediate, recognizable public channel, almost crude in its immediacy. Integrating a native AI assistant into that flow risks instead distort further the original project, shifting the axis from human conversation to algorithmic mediation. In short, we are very far from Jack Dorsey’s brilliant and far-sighted intuition. There remains a bit of nostalgia and inevitable worry.
