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In early 2006, Jack Dorsey – a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur at a San Francisco podcasting company called Odeo (which was later renamed Obvious Corporation) – told his boss Evan Williams about a very simple idea.
The firm was struggling and employees needed a faster way to share information with each other online, so Jack suggested creating an SMS-like group platform where team members could quickly update each other in real time.
The green light was given and the side-project was duly developed.
The new system needed a name and Jack’s colleague, Noah Glass, suggested ‘Twitter’ because it neatly summed up the chattering nature of the application. The domain name, however, was taken so they removed the vowels and dubbed it ‘Twttr’ instead.
At 12.50pm on 21 March 2006, Dorsey posted what would become history’s first ‘tweet’. “Just setting up my twttr”, he wrote. Soon, Odeo employees were spending every spare moment exchanging humorous banter online.
Realising its wider market potential, in July 2006, Odeo launched the product to the waiting world. Michael Arrington, a journalist at Tech Crunch in California, observed that “people are using it to send messages like ‘cleaning my apartment’ and ‘hungry’”. But he also noticed a rather glaring privacy issue.
Everyone on Twttr had a public page, which meant that all their posts could be read by complete strangers. As Arrington mused in a classic case of ‘how wrong can you be’: “I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.”
In fact, people did not mind one little bit – and, with the domain name ‘Twitter’ now purchased, the microblogging website soon took off.
The timing could not have been better.
The Good Old Days
Three months later, on 9 January 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco and declared that, as of “today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone”.
The new device would not just be a mobile but a media player too, and when the iPhone went on sale in June that year, it was nothing short of a revolution. Smartphones swiftly became ubiquitous and, as they did, Twitter and its rivals grew.
In 2005, just 5% of Americans were using some form of social media. By the start of 2010, the figure had spiralled to 65%. And just three years later, 75% of all Americans were looking up old friends on Facebook, or watching cats fall out of trees on YouTube, or arguing with complete strangers about the shape of the Earth on Twitter.
In fact, Twitter grew more slowly than its rivals – and there was a reason for that. The platform required concentration and practice. Users needed to distil their musings to a maximum 140 characters and there was a haiku-like art to writing the perfect tweet.
As such, it attracted a more discerning crowd.
A 2013 Pew Research study found that nearly half (45%) of Twitter users were between the ages of 18 and 29, and about the same number had a higher education qualification.
Research by Oxford University in 2016 found much the same result in the UK, where Twitter users tended to be younger, better paid, and better educated.
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The site quickly developed a reputation for being the place where intelligent discourse happened and, in those very early years, it had a strong sense of community.
The introduction of the hashtag – # – as a means of filtering conversations in 2007 not only allowed people with common interests to find each other, but also served as an easy way to curate content. More importantly, it soon became apparent that it provided an outstanding source of breaking news.
When terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai in 2008, Twitter users in the city were reporting events live using the hashtag #Mumbai before the mainstream media knew what was happening.
Three years later, at around 1am in the morning on 2 May 2011, a Pakistani software engineer called Sohaib Athar was taking advantage of the lat- night quiet to do some work when helicopter blades started to whir above his home. Taking to Twitter to ask if anyone knew what was going on, he was further interrupted when a massive explosion rocked the area.
“A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt”, he tweeted. “I hope its not the start of something nasty”. Athar was unwittingly breaking news of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound that would result in the Saudi terrorist’s death.
The notion of citizen journalism was not new.
In the 16th and 17th Centuries, pamphleteers had used a novel technology known as ‘printing’ to distribute short-form reportage, political commentary, and propaganda. And, despite the arrival of mainstream newspapers in the 1800s, well into the late 20th Century radical, independent publications had continued the work. Twitter now took on that mantle but, due to its very nature, it did so on a hitherto unimaginable scale.
The app could be subversive too. Capable of puncturing the egos of despots big and small, it was a natural place for campaigners and activists to organise.
During the Arab Spring in 2011, in Ukraine in 2014, and during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, it demonstrated an ability to rally demonstrators, counter state narratives, and hold the powers that be to account. That was why so many dictatorships – including Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela – would eventually ban it.
But Twitter wasn’t just about politics and breaking news. For some, it was a bit like an enormous virtual campus where you could wander from one interesting conversation to another. For others, it was just a place to hang out, exchange banter, and sit about in the vain hope that Justin Bieber might acknowledge their existence with a ‘like’.
Twitter, from the start, was chock full of famous people and what made it attractive to fans was that the barricades were down and you could potentially chat to your favourite actor, singer, or reality TV star.
On 17 April 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher became the first member of the Twitterati to gain a million followers and, as fellow celebrities took note, a whole galaxy of A-Z listers flocked to the site.
The new familiarity could breed contempt. Standing before their audience without PRs on hand, any number of famous people made career-wrecking choices.
In 2011, in a protracted series of posts by actor Charlie Sheen led to a very public meltdown (#winning) which ended with him getting fired from his hit show Two and a Half Men. He was one of the first, but very far from the last, celebrity to blow up their reputation online. A phalanx of famous names including Ye (formerly Kanye West), Roseanne Barr, Katie Hopkins, JK Rowling, and Graham Linehan were to follow.
As news corporations, politicians, and government agencies signed up to the site it became an ever-more important resource for information. The app was a buzzy political soapbox where lofty political egos could easily be punctured in its meritocratic atmosphere. As Twitter burgeoned, it not only made the news but began to exert huge influence on the wider political discourse.
Disinformation and the Arrival of Trump
Every ‘golden age’ is a fallacy, and Twitter’s halcyon era is no different.
The bluebird of 2010 was not some utopia where everyone was discussing Thucydides with Stephen Fry over cups of virtual latte. Trolls were a feature from the start and, as twitterstorms erupted and Twitter mobs descended, many a life was ruined.
Racism, homophobia, and misogyny were rife. A much-publicised campaign, led by journalist Caroline Criado-Perez in 2013, to re