The first tweet was launched on March 21, 2006 in San Francisco by Jack Dorsey, a young web developer from St. Louis. It was not very original or presage of future content: “Just setting up my Twittr” (then it was called that, without the “e”). Fifteen years later, that tweet is worth over $ 2.5 million and Twitter is a platform that can make a global leader like Trump successful, but also his disappearance from the public horizon. It can influence the stock market, fashions and behaviors, both individual and collective.
Outside of Twitter there is the world, there is the internet, with the billions of words and multimedia contents circulating every moment. Inside, there is a people who have made a distinctive trait out of a weak point, and which in a few characters strive to keep ingenuity, irony, information. The limit, Wittgenstein said, is what gives meaning, and the meaning of Twitter is also defined by its limit. What else would it be different from a blog or other social networks?
The first tweet in history, on March 21, 2006
Push the limits
Twitter was born when SMS are still popular, and in fact at the beginning it shares its length. If the characters are few, however, it is the paratext that provides other information. So on the web, in addition to the tweet, there is the alias of the writer and his real name, his biography, his previous messages: all add nuances, make the message more varied and meaningful. Then there is the @, which here serves to attract the attention of another, and who that other is is once again part of the text; if two people don’t follow each other, the first can let the second know that that tweet is about her. According to legend, the hashtag (the gate) was invented by a user, a certain Chris Messina. For some time it is no longer essential, yet for a misunderstood feeling of modernity many still use it, even outside of Twitter. Even sadder is the case of certain advertising hashtags: without the providential support of a sponsorship, they remain online to act as hats to old and haggard tweets, evidence of more or less willing but obviously failed marketing efforts.
Text and context
Over the years, in addition to messages, images and videos have arrived on Twitter. Thus, in addition to the text and the paratext, which already included images (that of the profile, that of the account, the background on which the tweets appear), today it is possible to insert a photo or a video and tag other people without subtracting precious characters. to the message. There is also the thrill of live video transmission, and soon that of audio, with Spaces, which was announced before Clubhouse, but comes later and seems to be following an already declining trend.
Each tweet has a meaning as such, but often at the same time refers to something else, it points the way to a world that is not Twitter, and contains links to articles, videos, multimedia contents that the blue bird cannot manage. The result is a double register of meaning, the intrinsic one of the tweet and that of the link, which of course is almost never clicked but which in the meantime is quoted, retweeted, circulated, decorated with hearts, only based on the title of the shared content. . Often we comment without having read, and for this reason Twitter, like a pedantic teacher, today asks if we are really sure we have read what we want to share.
The numbers
The definition of Wikipedia (“microblogging site”) appears limiting, that of “social network” is more fitting, given the possibility of interaction between members, but perhaps we could think of Twitter as a sort of great game, with only one rule, that of 140 characters, remained in force until September 2017. Today there are 280, but the sense of the limit does not change. There are threads, private messages, and a thousand other ways to write more: do we really need them?
Meanwhile, it seems that we need Twitter: this applies not only to Donald Trump, who without his favorite social network has lost an audience of ordinary people and journalists who amplified his words, but also for the companies that are always beginning to exploit plus the platform for advertising. After fifteen years, the company has only recently begun to record profits: revenues for the last quarter amounted to 1.29 billion dollars, thanks mainly to the increase in online advertising due to the pandemic and the consequent growth of e-commerce. . The number of users is also growing slightly: today there are 353 million active ones, but Facebook has almost 2.8 billion. “Twitter is a fundamental service, it will be there in 2020 and also in 2030, said Jack Dorsey on the occasion of the tenth anniversary, regardless of the ever-increasing popularity of Instagram and TikTok, frequented mainly by a younger audience.
Especially for them the Fleets will arrive, which are like a bit like the Stories of Instagram, the tweets that cancel after 24 hours and the premium ones (visible only to those who pay a subscription) will debut. And who knows if anything will arise from the recent acquisition of the high-fidelity music streaming platform Tidal, which Dorsey took over for $ 297 million.
Primary issues
Twitter needs politics and diplomacy, even though it has long been clear that the platform is not neutral. During and after the 2016 American presidential elections he deleted tweets from accounts close to the Russian Internet Research Agency spreading disinformation, even in June alone, he had 175,000 propaganda accounts operating for the Chinese Communist Party, the United Russia Party, or Erdogan. And with the spread of the coronavirus, Twitter has tried to stop the circulation of false medical information relating to the pandemic, using labels and warnings. To stem fake news, the social network launched the crowd-sourced Birdwatch program in January 2021, where some users deemed reliable, a sort of popular jury, evaluate tweets and responses.
But after Trump’s permanent ban (and in his small way, the limitations imposed for a few hours by the platform on the Libero newspaper), it is clear that the question of accessing Twitter and moderation of posted content is far from a solution. Can a private company, driven by commercial interests, stand up as a judge on what is right and not right to make public? No, according to experts and ordinary people, and Jack Dorsey himself is aware of this: while defending the Trump ban, a few weeks ago he admitted that it is “a dangerous precedent”.