X

      

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For other uses, see X (disambiguation).

X
YouTuber Information
Handle	@X.com
Style	Commentary, News & Tech
Date joined	March 24, 2006
Twitter / X	@X @twitter
Facebook	TwitterInc
Instagram and Threads	@twitter
Other media	Website TikTok Pinterest
Videos	5
Status	Inactive
Personal information
Nationality	American
Location	Bastrop, Texas, United States
Channel trailer
Behind The Meme with Usher- -WatchThis - Twitter
Most viewed video
Signing Up for Twitter
First video
Twitter see what's happening

“	What's happening?!	”
―X (@twitter)

X, formerly known as Twitter, is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages commonly known by many users as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and repost posts, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access X through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software application. X, Corp. is based in Bastrop, Texas, and has more than 25 offices around the world. Twitter, Inc. was the company that used to rule Twitter before it went defunct. Posts on Twitter were originally restricted to 140 characters, but was doubled to 280 for non-Asian languages in November 2017. On December 12, 2022, X would announce plans to expand the character limit to 4000 characters.

X was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, launched in July of that year as "Twitter". The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.

Controversy

Inappropriate content

X allows pornographic content as long as it is marked "sensitive" by uploaders, which puts it behind an interstice and hides it from minors. The "super-follow" feature is said to enable competition with the subscription site OnlyFans, used mainly by sex workers. Many performers use Twitter's service to market and grow their porn businesses, attracting users to paywalled services like OnlyFans by distributing photos and short video clips as advertisements.

In April 2022, Twitter convened a "Red Team" for the project of ACM, "Adult Content Monetization", as it is known internally. Eventually, the project was abandoned, because of the difficulty of implementing Real ID.

Child Abuse exploitation

A February 2021 report from the company's Health team begins, "While the amount of CSE (child sexual exploitation) online has grown exponentially, Twitter's investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not."

Until February 2022, the only way for users to flag illegal content was to flag it as "sensitive media", a broad category that left much of the worst material unprioritized for moderation. In a February report, employees wrote that Twitter, along with other Tech Companies have "accelerated the pace of CSE content creation and distribution to a breaking point where manual detection, review, and investigations no longer scale" by allowing pornography and failing to invest in systems that could effectively monitor it. The working group made several recommendations, but they were not taken up and the group was disbanded. As part of its efforts to monetize porn, Twitter held an internal investigation which reported in April 2022, "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale."

John Doe et al. v. Twitter, a civil lawsuit filed in the 9th Circuit Court, alleges that Twitter benefited from sex trafficking and refused to remove the illegal tweets when first informed of them. In an amicus brief filed in the case, the NCMEC said, "The children informed the company that they were minors, that they had been 'baited, harassed, and threatened' into making the videos, that they were victims of 'sex abuse' under investigation by law enforcement" but Twitter failed to remove the videos, "allowing them to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of the platform's users".

Some major brands, including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes, and PBS Kids suspended their marketing campaigns and pulled their ads from the platform after an investigation showed that Twitter failed to suspend 70% of the accounts that shared or solicited the prohibited content.

Court cases, lawsuits, and adjudications

Twitter Inc. v. Taamneh, alongside Gonzalez v. Google, were heard by the United States Supreme Court during its 2022–2023 term. Both cases dealt with Internet content providers and whether they are liable for terrorism-related information posted by their users. In the case of Twitter v. Taamneh, the case asked if Twitter and other social media services are liable for user-generated terrorism content under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and are beyond their Section 230 protections. The court ruled in May 2023 that the charges brought against Twitter and other companies were not permissible under the Antiterrorism Act, and did not address the Section 230 question. This decision also supported the Court's per curiam decision in Gonzalez returning that case to the lower court for review in light of the Twitter decision.

In 2016, Twitter shareholder Doris Shenwick filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Inc., claiming executives misled investors over the company's growth prospects. In 2021, Twitter agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle.

In May 2022, X agreed to pay $150 million to settle a lawsuit started by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit concerned Twitter's use of email addresses and phone numbers of Twitter users to target advertisements at them. The company also agreed to third-party audits of its data privacy program. On November 3, 2022, on the eve of expected layoffs, a group of Twitter employees based in San Francisco and Cambridge filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Naming five current or former workers as plaintiffs, the suit accused the company of violating federal and state laws that govern notice of employment termination. The federal law in question is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and the state law in question is California's state WARN Act.

On November 20, 2023, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, a media watchdog group. The lawsuit alleges defamation by Media Matters following its publication of a report claiming that advertisements for major brands were displayed alongside posts promoting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

On August 6, 2024, X filed an antitrust lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers, Unilever, Mars, CVS and Ørsted, alleging that the advertisers had conspired via their participation in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to withhold "billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the platform. The World Federation Of Advertisers created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media in 2019 to address "illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising". On August 13, 2024, the Workplace Relations Commission ordered Twitter to pay €550,000 to former senior staffer Gary Rooney in an unfair dismissal case. Twitter had argued that Rooney's failure to check "yes" at the bottom of an email from Elon Musk constituted resignation.

Trivia

• On October 28, 2022, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk.
• On July 22, 2023, Elon Musk announced that if anyone comes up with a new logo for Twitter (now called X), their logo will be applied globally.
  • On July 23, 2023, a new X logo was implemented, and Twitter has been rebranded as X.
  • The new logo is similar to a unicode, named "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X" (𝕏).
• The usage of the word "tweet" was removed from features. Features such as retweets, tweets, and anything corresponding to that word have been stripped away and left with generic terms - such as "posts" & "reposts". Despite this, many people still call them tweets.

References

Attribution

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