Twenty years ago on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet, which simply read "just setting up my twttr". It was not a particularly prescient or eloquent beginning to what would become one of the most influential platforms of the 21st century. Nor was it the kind of message that typically ages well. Yet for the next decade and beyond, Twitter managed something remarkable: it became genuinely useful to millions of people as a tool for real-time information, culture, and connection.
According to Forrester research, weekly Twitter usage among US adults fell from 22 per cent in 2022 to 17 per cent in 2025. Mere numbers might seem bloodless, but they point to something more significant. From 2023 to 2025, X has increasingly been seen as less entertaining, less enjoyable, less informative, and more fake. This anniversary does not feel like a victory lap.
The platform's identity crisis began with a takeover. Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion. What followed was decisive and brutal: Musk axed roughly 80% of the company's headcount in rolling layoffs in the months after his takeover. Staff across policy, trust and safety, communications, and ethical AI were eliminated. Musk stated that his goal with the acquisition was to promote free speech on the platform. The practical consequences of this philosophy, however, diverged sharply from the stated intention. Since his acquisition, the platform has been criticised for enabling the increased spread of disinformation and hate speech.
Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024. The rebrand was not merely cosmetic. Musk merged Twitter into X Corp., ending its existence as a standalone company, cutting ties with Twitter's public identity and letting Musk reshape the service on his own terms. What emerged was something different: a platform built to Musk's vision rather than its users' needs.
The financial toll has been substantial. Twitter revenue halved in three years, falling from a $5 billion peak in 2021, just before the acquisition, to $2.5 billion in 2024. Advertising, long the platform's lifeblood, vanished as brands withdrew support. The algorithm itself changed. By February 2023, Twitter's algorithm had been altered to artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000. The message was clear: this was no longer a neutral town square.
For those who remembered Twitter's earlier years, the transformation prompted genuine melancholy. As one social media researcher put it, "we're celebrating the successes of the first decade of Twitter's existence and lamenting the many and often self-inflicted failures of the second." The platform had once been a place where breaking news happened organically, where activists coordinated, where culture surfaced in real time. By 2025, genuine information was drowned in a flood of far-right talking points, bot posts, and AI slop.
Even Dorsey's original burst of internet wealth now symbolises the wider malaise. The first tweet was sold as an NFT for $2.9 million in 2021. When the buyer attempted to resell it, the top bid was just $280. In less than a year, an absurdly valuable asset had become nearly worthless. It is a fitting metaphor for what has happened to Twitter itself.
This anniversary is an important opportunity to reflect on what we have lost, how and why we have lost it, and what can be done to prevent such situations from happening again with other important platforms for public debate. Twenty years after Dorsey typed seven words into his phone, that question has become urgent.